Whatever comparison you do, you should compare a representative subset of both populations in similar situations in life, not just cherry pick the self selected ones, the successful and survivors, ones from one population against the potatos from the other.
There is no point of comparison in five dedicated years of highly academic study versus 6 months of touching the techs du jour. Will the boot campers have also graph theory background? And compilers and assembly or just webpack preprocessors? Database design or just picking stacks? and compilers and network protocols?
Are you sure you are not comparing a 35 year old responsible person who made a boot camp to sustain his family or an entitled post-grad IT engineer who is still a bit high from the graduation party? It would be hypocrite not to admit that a hungry serious battle tested individual will have the right attitude to build a role rather than the not serious entitled individual who just wants to see what he can get from there and does not make any effort in continuously improve.
Once in a plane I met a CEO who told me he would take any day an engineer for the decision making role or business related roles. Was he crazy or it was just his previous experience conditioning him? you can take whoever you want for your company, even someone who took gender studies and ended up taking a code camp hoping to pay its former debt and ends up making high impact blog posts about thyr experience in the digital IT world as person of XYZ gender.
> Whatever comparison you do, you should compare a representative subset of both populations in similar situations in life
Well, yes and no.
If you're an 18 year old who wants to program computers and you read Turing and Dijkstra for fun, then go study math or physics, which you won't have much time to do later. Or pick a subject in the humanities if you like to read and write. Is it a great way to become a programmer? Maybe not, it would be better to just go and get an internship or a job, but (1) smart companies are hard to find and (2) you'd be missing out on a chance to get a university education at the age when most people do so.
On the other hand, if you're picking coworkers, go with the self-motivated one who had to learn everything they learned because they were interested in it, over the one who had to learn it to get a degree in a field that everyone knows is a ticket to a high-paying job.
> Once in a plane I met a CEO who told me he would take any day an engineer for the decision making role or business related roles. Was he crazy
Sure, this is the same point: if the only thing you're good at is your specialization, then you're probably not going to be very good at it. Unless it's something like chess that really has minimal relation with anything else in society.
There is no point of comparison in five dedicated years of highly academic study versus 6 months of touching the techs du jour. Will the boot campers have also graph theory background? And compilers and assembly or just webpack preprocessors? Database design or just picking stacks? and compilers and network protocols?
Are you sure you are not comparing a 35 year old responsible person who made a boot camp to sustain his family or an entitled post-grad IT engineer who is still a bit high from the graduation party? It would be hypocrite not to admit that a hungry serious battle tested individual will have the right attitude to build a role rather than the not serious entitled individual who just wants to see what he can get from there and does not make any effort in continuously improve.
Once in a plane I met a CEO who told me he would take any day an engineer for the decision making role or business related roles. Was he crazy or it was just his previous experience conditioning him? you can take whoever you want for your company, even someone who took gender studies and ended up taking a code camp hoping to pay its former debt and ends up making high impact blog posts about thyr experience in the digital IT world as person of XYZ gender.