It gets you one of two things.
If you've done the job for years (like me), then it provides you with a piece of paper that says, "No, really. WBill might know what he's talking about." If I had to wade through HR Departments and the like again to find a job, then I might look at getting certified.
OR, it's an excellent start. Gets your feet wet, and might set you up for a low-level entry position where you can actually start to learn something.
So, in those regards, I suppose that a bootcamp might be useful. Anything else, meh.
You know, the way I knew that the Dot-Com boom (back in the late 90s) was coming to an end, was by the flyers that were tacked up on phone poles: "Become a MICROSOFT CERTIFIED ENGINEER in THREE WEEKS or LESS!!!!!" At that point, I said "The market is saturated, better find myself a safe solid job and hunker down for awhile.".
Might need to start thinking in that direction, again.
Most of the guys who know how to write great code 'hacked' they way into the world.
I agree... it does seem a little like deja-vu to me. I am comingat it from a different perspective however.
I worked as a “computer lab assistant” in the late 1980s. I was a computer “hobbiest” for many years prior to that. I worked on my first “radio shack digital computer IC chip kit when I was in the 5th grade in the early 1970s. I owned several “home computers” and put together a few XT and AT clones. I had also dabbled in programming and actually did have a small amount of formal training.
I had a very easy time helping students with their homework. So by the mid 1980s I had a good understanding of small computers from that time period. The main thing that I helped students with were Word Perfect, Lotus 123, DOS, Basic programming, and a couple of other introductory macro and programming languages. Graphical interfaces had been introduced but were still more of a curiosity to the business community so the community college didn’t really cover them.
I saw a lot of people with good jobs that they didn’t like who decided that they wanted to learn about “computers” and start a new career. Many of them had no understanding and worse... little aptitude for what they thought that they wanted to get into. What is different these days is that computers have become so ingrained in everything that we do that most people have an idea of whether or not they have an interest or aptitude for digging deeper into programming, web design, data entry or any other computer related field.
One of the students that I tried to help was a plumber with a god paying but unfulfilling job. He just wanted to get into “compuuters” and make more money. The poor guy had zero understanding and seemed to be unteachable but then he went on to a highly successful career at Microsoft... just kidding... he failed miserably. There are some people who simply have no aptitude for certain fields and others who can excell with almost no training at all.
I would imagine that most of the people who take these “boot camp” classes have already got some background and know a little about what they are getting into. It is hard to imagine someone spending $10,000 without cracking open a few books or watching a few instructional videos ahead of time.