Why students are throwing tons of money at a program that won't give degrees
This will always be a divisive subject and my opinion will likely be equally divisive.<p>For the record, I took a bootcamp over doing a master&#x27;s in CS: the clincher for such a decision came when an engineer friend at a tech unicorn said he&#x27;d take a smart bootcamper over a regular CS grad on the basis that from hiring experiences:<p>- you don&#x27;t use most of the stuff you learn from CS at work (when was the last time you proved root two was irrational, or used red-black trees on the job?)<p>- a bootcamper will write cleaner code and is less likely to have some of the stereotypical traits engineers are prone to having (e.g. takes feedback badly&#x2F;doesn&#x27;t communicate well&#x2F;takes feedback badly) he attributes this to the more diverse pool of people boot camps attract<p>To be frank, I think the aversion to bootcampers primarily stems from individuals&#x27; need to validate their own life choices thinking things like &quot;I studied CS for four years to become a Software Engineer so how could someone come close to playing catch up in 3 months!?&quot;<p>But really this style of thought is flawed - people underestimate the fundamental value of doing a degree, which teaches you way more than just knowledge. Think how much less developed you were intellectually coming out of high school than post college.<p>With that said, it&#x27;s also probably true that there are plenty of bootcamp graduates out there with an inflated sense of worth and companies that have hired&#x2F;rejected poor bootcampers and now have a set opinion about bootcamps.<p>To these people it&#x27;s worth noting that bootcamps have only been around for a couple of years, and as is the case in any good startups, the product improves as the companies grow and mature and have time to iteratively improve it.<p>Graduates from a bootcamp today are probably of appreciably higher quality than they were back then.