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Just curious, how do you define "hitting the ground running"

Roughly, someone who at the start can work independently on an existing business-critical[1], medium-sized[2] app to first fix bugs without adding major tech debt[3] and then take features from planning to deployment/maintenance, and then ultimately (6-12 months, since we were a very small shop), independently steer architecture and be solo on call.

[1] hundreds of thousands in sales a day [2] around 10-50k LOC, but a far cry from the greenfield toy apps that bootcamp devs spend 90% of their time with [3] position: relative and z-index: 100 fixes many UI bugs, but if a dev has that as a main piece of their toolkit, you take on UI code debt or drag down the team to steer solutions in the right direction.

That certainly sounds like a more senior role.

My take on bootcamp grads (I am one), is that the purpose is to make them a competitive or superior option to a fresh CS grad. How does that expectation compare to your experience?

Yeah "hit the ground running" was decidedly not the standard for bootcamp grads. This was our more senior unicorn hire. Like any shop though we did have simpler more isolated work that was still needing doing, so we pared those off for grads.

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