IMHO, if you are self-taught, have been able to build a portfolio of projects showing your skills with several of the latest technologies, your profile is much more valuable than if you have been to a bootcamp.
Going to a bootcamp shows you are just another good student, who can sit in a classroom for 10hours straight in a day, during 12 weeks, and get good marks.
When you are self-taught, you show that beyond your new technical skills, you have the self-discipline, and drive to learn and practice new skills from scratch, without someone holding your hand. This must be a skill that any employer would value highly. Employers would want their SW engineers to be autonomous, and have the self-discipline to initiate to keep learning, because with SW, you need to constantly learn if you want your skills to remain up to date. Teaching yourself SW is hard. If you manage to do that, the proof is there that you are passionate about what you're doing, because I don't believe it is possible to teach yourself SW without being passionate about it.
There are heaps of resources online nowadays to teach yourself SW engineering.
At good bootcamps, most people are already extremely self-taught. I had basically mastered jQuery, Python, and SQL when I went to a bootcamp (Hackreactor) to get better with algorithms and the latest frameworks.
It's really about how much money you have. If you've got significant savings like I did, it makes sense to pay as time becomes more valuable than money in your life plan.
This is more or less false. Most bootcamps don't give 'marks'. Most of them are also not lecture based. Instead, they are likely to assess through assignments and/or projects. They help you progressively build towards a solid base of knowledge while you work on building out a portfolio. I would say the accelerated time span is due to curated resources and the immediate feedback loop. Concepts that normally take a week or longer to grok from searching on the web, can be reduced to a few hours at a bootcamp.
You also seem to think attending a bootcamp automatically precludes a student from being able to provide themselves with continuing education.
There are different motivations for people entering a bootcamp and some are looking for that paycheck. But again, that does not necessarily make them a bad SW engineer. And if those people would like to keep their salary, they will learn soon enough that they will not get very far with stale knowledge.
It's clear you have very little knowledge of what happens at bootcamps. I would think of them more as a place where they give you a path to accomplish self study tasks than a classroom. Also, I don't know about other bootcamps, but I came out with a reasonable portfolio. That's a big part of the program.
The portfolio is usually not worth much. Each project has ~4 people working on it, so it's hard to tell how much credit / blame you should get for it. And since you were at a bootcamp motivated to see you finish, how much hand holding did you get from them? Another problem is that I've seen the same, probably 10 projects implemented dozens of times each at this point. They are all almost exactly the same, with very little difference in implementations. When I try to dive in and ask about implementation questions or how they would change it to support a particular feature or why they think this glaringly obvious bug exists, most of the graduates can't answer my questions, often because "oh, I didn't work on that part".
Don't get me wrong, I've met some brilliant and capable bootcampers, who I suspect would've done just as well or better outside of a bootcamp, but my point is that having a bootcamp portfolio isn't much of a signal.
That is entirely reasonable. I wasn't commenting on how good the programmers are, just how well those specific things are perceived on resumes with no prior coding-as-a-professional experience.
