I see your point, but I think you may have missed mine. Let's say there are ten successful older programmers interviewed. Seven of them went to coding basecamps, two of them went back to school, and one of them was entirely self-taught. I, as someone who wants to be a developer concludes that going to a coding boot camp is the best way to become a developer later in life.

The problem is that there might be 1000 people who attended boot camps and went on to work in McDonalds for every one who got a developer job — 0.1 percent became developers. But maybe only ten of the self-taught people work in McDonalds for every one who got a programming job. It would be smarter to self-learn in that situation.

But, if all you ever see are the successes, you have no way to decide which is the best course of action.