There's a fair amount of negative reporting about bootcamps for overstating results and providing poor learning experiences, but there are a lot of success stories too.
I'm looking for opinions and advice.
AI Large Language Models provide effective learning resources for coding - you can ask questions, get answers, dig deeper, get code snippet examples. Does this mean we no longer need the formal tuition style that bootcamps provide?
Are bootcamps worth the money?
With so many good free and inexpensive online learning options available are there still any valid reasons for investing in a bootcamp course?
What other advice can you give to someone who wants to transition to a developer role?
Many thanks!
Bootcamps mainly focus on teaching a small set of specific skills - Ruby/Rails, JS/React, etc. A developer has to know at least one language and set of tools, but that's not sufficient to get a job, or work on real software projects. I think bootcamps gave the best value to experienced programmers looking to expand their toolbox, and to give newbies a chance to see if they can learn the skills at all. As a path to actual employment bootcamps never did all that well, and with the current job market you might just be throwing money away. Depends a lot on the person and the bootcamp, of course.
Anecdotally (I have 40+ years of professional programming experience, so a lot of anecdotal evidence) almost all serious programmers I've known mainly taught themselves, with lots of practice, and mentoring if they got lucky. Few employers offer real training, mentoring, or career development so you're mostly on your own. And even if you get good with several years of practice, persuading a potential employer that you can add value and work with a team will require good soft skills on your part, and a leap of faith on theirs.
That is, most paying work in programming is working on some code that other people wrote who often are distant open source practitioners, people who aren't working on your team anymore, people who are on your team who might be busy and not really wanting to talk about it or who might not really understand how and why the code works.
Ideally you would completely understand what the code does, practically that's impossible (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halting_problem, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collatz_conjecture) and you're going to have to work hard to get enough understanding of the code, whatever it is, so you can make what management thinks is a "small" change surgically.
AI is better than humans at recall but worse are reasoning and generalization. I've found Copilot is brilliant at explaining the meaning of repetitive but weird code snippets (like functions inserted by the Babel transpiler) that are all over its training data.
I've been asking questions of Copilot for a recent project, I think it is helpful but not revolutionary. It can be better than Stackoverflow.
A bootcamp is 6-9 months, but even an undergrad CS degree is 4 full years, and probably more intense than a bootcamp day-to-day. And even they are struggling to get entry-level jobs right now. So that's what you'd be competing with.
I think you should save your money on the bootcamp and just self-learn computer science. There are so, so many free resources out there[^1]. It's easier than ever to make personal projects and post them to GitHub. Share what you're learning publicly - start a blog, and write. A diploma is a proxy for the knowledge you've supposedly acquired - without that, you need a way to show employers that you know things.
My take on LLMs for learning coding is that they provide a fantastic resource to keep open in a window to provide context and explanation when needed, and they can therefore make self learning significantly more effective.
After a bit more research I found this course which is a self learning boot camp on Udemy and comes recommended.
https://www.udemy.com/course/the-complete-web-development-bo...