We have been looking for a very entry-level dev to be in a pretty entry level role that would be perfect for someone to get their feet wet in the industry.

Every single person we've interviewed from a "hacker school" has been from Hack Reactor. I'd say something like 40% of them would actually be able to be some sort of "developer" given that they keep up the practice. About 20% (at best) are what I would consider an actual "entry level dev intern"

Entry level in this context is basically just the ability to code some basic html, css, javascript, with a computer given to you, and a task to work on over the course of a day. Many of the previous Hack Reactor students we had interview (at least 60%) (some even being "assistants"), in my opinion, have no business in software development. They were technical enough to understand "web dev" in conversation, but just couldn't manifest that into anything useful without huge amounts of guidance for menial tasks.

It is possible to learn enough programming to within 10 weeks to get a job programming. Of course they won't be the best programmers at that point. But I've hired bootcamp grads and have had other friends go through, and they have been positive outcomes. Yes, that is anecdotal data, but it categorically proves false that "it's simply not possible to learn to program in bootcamp time frames."

Let me add a 2nd data point- as a 2013 DBC grad, I would still be in my previous career (completely unrelated to engineering) if I hadn't attended DBC. My instructors and classmates were instrumental in helping me get out of a job I hated and into one I love. It wasn't a perfect experience, but it was a life-changing one, and I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

> For the truly motivated it is much better to go to recurse.com or join a learning Meetup.

Speaking of data, care to provide any which supports this opinion?

> most bootcamps are overpromising and underdelivering on their promises of gainful employment.

You generalize about an entire industry without providing evidence, and then you use that generalization to denigrate a specific company within that industry which may or may not buck a trend. A trend which you haven't even proven exists, btw. Nice.

I'd like to hear your thoughts.

No matter how motivated you are, you'll be casting around and learning aimlessly a bunch of random material about "programming" because you don't really know the nuances of the market as well.

Me: Turbo nerd, generally well-informed in the ways of technology, but outside the industry. Was working as a teacher and then a recruiter. I even took Harvard's CS50x class, so I knew the very basics of programming (some languages are compiled, others... aren't?), but I didn't really know that web development was the hot hiring field, I didn't know Javascript was the language of the web, that you could even use it for backend if you wanted. In fact, I didn't even really consider that there was a difference between front and back end.

So for 17,000 I was able to have all that sorted for me in 3 months flat, then kicked out into the industry a viable app developer. I went from a shit set of jobs straight into a bonafide, legitimate, and stable career trajectory. ~5 months total time investment. It simply would not have been possible to be so efficient by self-teaching, I wouldn't have known where to begin, what to study, that web dev had the lowest barrier to entry, etc. Literally the job placement stuff was completely useless and unused to me, I was a recruiter and so didn't use any of that stuff from my bootcamp, the thing that made it valuable to me was the curriculum.