Imagine you had spent years and a lot of money studying 1'st normative forms. You have a lot of pride in in this knowledge... it represents a significant investment in time and money and makes you feel special. Suddenly, a 3 month bootcamp is insinuating it can turn out developers making almost what you are. You may just get a little dicky.
But I would guess there are at least a few shop owning mechanics who make as much as the highly degreed engineers designing the parts they install. And no shortage of plumbers making more than people who have graduate level knowledge of Latin. It's not fair. Life isn't fair. But from what I see, life rewards practical know-how... which may or may not entail academic credentials and esoteric knowledge.
Nobody is insinuating that they'll be competing with you. I had a class of 18, I'm one of two who ended up as a back end developer. It wouldn't surprise you much to learn that the two of us were both Math majors. The rest were design-y people who wanted to expand their job prospects and ended up as front end developers. I mean this in the nicest of ways to front end developers, but your algorithms mean jack-shit to them.
As one of those few back end developers, I would HOPE I'm not competing with you for a job, as that would then have been a waste of my time and money. That being said, 4 years down the road of real world experience, I doubt there will be any separation between myself and someone with a CS degree and 4 years of work experience. Real life converges. From my couple years post-GA, I'm perfectly capable of talking the talk with the CS majors who think the two letters give them superpowers.
Again, nobody is implying 3 months will match your 4 years. However, thinking that 3 months of immersion doesn't give you enough knowledge to gain the REAL knowledge on the job would be ignorant. I'm reasonably confident if you blindfolded me and dumped me in France, I'd be speaking french in 3 months. I doubt I'd be able to appreciate The Count Of Monte Cristo, but I'd be more than capable of navigating day to day life.
>That being said, 4 years down the road of real world experience, I doubt there will be any separation between myself and someone with a CS degree and 4 years of work experience.
That depends entirely on what you do in those 4 years. If you spend that time studying algorithms, data structures, graph theory, discrete math, and the theory of computation, then you may be right.
If you spend those 4 years making CRUD apps, then there will still be a large gap.
I speak from experience by the way. I was a professional programmer for 5 years before I went back to get my CS degree. There were so many things that I didn't know that I didn't know.
It's the difference between spending a week banging your head against a wall or spending 20 minutes realizing your problem is just a variant of a graph theory problem that was solved 50 years ago.
> There were so many things that I didn't know that I didn't know.
I think that puts it very well. It's not just what people know they don't know, it's what they don't know they don't know. That's where it really hits them.
But I would guess there are at least a few shop owning mechanics who make as much as the highly degreed engineers designing the parts they install. And no shortage of plumbers making more than people who have graduate level knowledge of Latin. It's not fair. Life isn't fair. But from what I see, life rewards practical know-how... which may or may not entail academic credentials and esoteric knowledge.