If your career can be significantly affected by devs fresh from bootcamp

Well, there are certainly problems if that's the case. But it's not necessarily senior ICs that are the problem.

I've experienced a few companies where "boot camp yahoos" wound up essentially running the show to ruinous effect. Why? They had numbers, essentially, and management was too hands-off to prevent it.

To give a specific example: we had a product where our UX was basically: fill out this HTML form to apply for a financial product. Traditional dinosaur-style server side rendering was more than enough.

The front end boot camp yahoos somehow wound up forcibly moving us to React. They got that pushed through and approved before anybody knew about it because they gave a bunch of BS stats to management who didn't care and also didn't have the technical chops to spot the BS.

The end result was that simple changes to the UX (like adding a question to the form, or removing it) required 1,000+ lines of code across multiple repos. Hundreds of hours dealing with that mess for zero gain instead of actually doing things that made the company money or improved our process in meaningful ways.

Senior ICs had no real chance to oppose this plan, and many of them were happy simply to get "React" onto their resumes.

So yeah, problems aplenty, but it's possible to be an IC and have one's shit rocked by this kind of thing through no real fault of one's own.

(I'm not crapping on React specifically here. It is powerful and there are use cases where it excels. I am also not crapping on junior or boot camp engineers. They are doing their best. It's a management problem.)

You describe the scenario I am complaining about. These boot camp developers do not have the background for large scale engineering, yet get cast into it side by side with real seasoned engineers. However, that real seasoned engineer is a small fraction of the "dev team" and gets overwhelmed by the boot camp developer's group thinking - their opinion is just as good as the guy with the CS degree they figure, after all, their boot camp crowd seems to win the debates! And the employer's development quality goes to shit as the people actually trained on large scale project development are overwhelmed by fast food educated "developers".

Amen.

    However, that real seasoned engineer is a small 
    fraction of the "dev team" and gets overwhelmed 
    by the boot camp developer's group thinking - 
    their opinion is just as good as the guy with the 
    CS degree they figure, after all, their boot camp 
    crowd seems to win the debates!

Oh my god. So true. Heaven help us.

1000's of lines changed to add/remove a field from a form has nothing to do with react. That's just shit design.

Yeah. Although, that was my point?

This wasn't a rant against React. It was about the inmates (or junior devs) running the asylum.

That would assume quality is valued by an employer, versus shitt apps.

Checking boxes on a project plan seems to be the priority. Everything else is rather uninteresting to them.