I never have attended a coding boot camp so I can't say anything about the level. If it is full time I think a dedicated person can learn enough to get started at a company - especially if using a high level language. |
I think you're right, too. But I don't think that's a good thing, and I'm not convinced that a CS education is necessarily a waste of time even in context.
I guess my lack of experience is showing.... Programming languages are supposed to be easy. That is, ease-of-use is often a design goal, and I suspect that success in this regard is why it's feasible to hire people with only a few weeks of practice.
Regardless, I think that software quality suffers thanks to a pervasive lack of rigor, which formal education seeks to repair. It's easy to teach coding, but it's not so easy to teach the levels of understanding helpful to making good design decisions. I
expect that programmers without formal training are less equipped to design better software, and I'm not convinced that building (more) crappy software is sustainable.
Even if CS is only useless to normal application programmers, normal application programmers don't live in a bubble and everybody loses when bad decisions propagate. A CS curriculum should ideally train people to do software
design, and for that reason I'm hesitant to dismiss it.