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Katie • Edited

An MIT grad once told me that there was an old saying about the students there: you could lock them in the gymnasium with every book in the library for four years, no professors, and they'd graduate with the same education as MIT was providing them.

It seems to me that coding boot camps function somewhat the same way.

"Prestigious" ones that are hard to get into attract people who just need 12 weeks of seclusion to learn a lot, and the camp serves as a certificate saying "yup, they learned everything we threw at them." Between the prestige / connections of the camp and the camp offering recent grads opportunities to help teach (so they can make rent while they job-hunt), folks coming out of those programs ... especially who got in while the programs are still relatively young ... seem to have done great. They took their entry-level job that barely required any knowledge (but instead required a strong work ethic), blew it out of the water, and learned the rest of what they needed to know over the years on the job or at home.

For most other people, it seems to go about like getting a 4-year philosophy degree at a non-prestigious university goes. They struggle afterwards. Some of them eventually make it, but "credentialing" of any sort definitely seems to best help self-starters who were willing to do crappy grunt work after they finished (in the name of starting to build a resume) and who were already on track and able to leverage connections they made at camp or elsewhere to get that first grunt-work job.