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2 had 2-3 years experience post boot camp. They are excellent mid-senior devs. They are from Flatiron School.
We have hired 3 juniors straight out of camp. All are on boarding at or exceeding our expectations. 2 are from App Academy, one is from GA.
EDIT: I'm pretty certain our JRs don't make 100k.
Although I think your idea of who goes to these bootcamps is pretty off. These aren't people who "had never opened a text editor in their lives." Some of them are people who were working in science, doing research and matlab programming, and wanted to make a career switch. Others are people who maybe majored in math, or perhaps a completely non-technical major but went to a bunch of hackathons or took some intro programming classes for fun, and then when they realized they loved tech it was to late for them to make the switch in college.
Top programs like the Flatiron school are NOT a walk in the park. They are intensive, 60-80 hour a week programs with a very low acceptance rate.
Of the dozen plus people I know who have gone through one, I can't think of a single person who had never programmed before entering into one of these bootcamps (not that it is not possible!).
"looking around, there don't seem to be many jobs for entry-level Rails or iOS developers. If you look around on job boards, there simply is not much competition for entry-level talent."
What? I get emails every other day from recruiters hiring for their social mobile ruby on rails web app. The tech shortage is present more than ever in every level of the industry.
I recently interviewed a ton of boot campers and the skill level varies greatly. I would have hired a few of them for junior level roles, but we were really looking for more experienced people. IF you are considering boot camps is try to get in early so you have access to the best people there. My guess is that the best get snapped up fast.
To give you an idea about what kind of juniority is attractive to a shop like ours: We run our own in-house internship program which takes 9 months. It requires CS degree plus some previous experience (private pet projects are OK) to enter.
The intern is paid living expenses and has vacation like other employees. The goal of the program is to hire the intern as a permanent junior developer after 9 months. Junior starting salary is also a far cry below 100K USD, but then again we don't have to live in San Francisco.
We treat our QA department as kind of a software engineering farm team. In fact, I don't know the last time we hired an entry-level SE directly. So maybe our QA engineers are what other places might consider a "junior SE".
It's common to put people who are already employed through these things when their skills are out of date. You'd much prefer a JS developer than a Fortran or Pascal developer today, right? But many huge corporations have only the later.
What was great about Flatiron: - Really good faculty that cared not just about tech, but about teaching - Really good curriculum that fosters basic CS skills and an 'engineering mindset' instead of just 'learning Rails' - Fosters an attitude that encourages learning for learning's sake - Great support through the job placement system.
What was not so great: - You really can't come in with 0 experience and come out a competent developer. Most of the people in the program had at least some prior familiarity with coding, even if the experience was shallow. - Instruction focuses on the students at the middle of the individual semester's bell curve. Students with no experience (or lacking basic computer skills) can get left behind, students with way more experience (or more aptitude) can get bored. - To me, the average salary touted by the school is inflated. Most people seem to have landed in jobs that pay around 50-60k initially, although many people are able to move to higher paying positions quickly.
I haven't personally been through the GA bootcamp, but I know two people who have and have worked/interviewed with others that have. GA seems to not really give a shit about actually educating people or getting them jobs, just about making sure they pay tuition. There is little to no job counseling, instructors are of (at best) mixed quality, and the curriculum is extremely confused.
Like anything else that you're going to spend 12k on, do your research before you commit. Some schools are great, some are not, and what you get out of it always depends on what you put into it. Look for one (like flatiron) with great job placement, and connections to companies.
Additionally, the idea that 'most companies' require a CS degree for web devs is just not true. Most job postings that are out in the wild might ask for that, but most companies hire new devs through job placement services, or connections that can vouch for the skills of non-degreed developers, rather than through cattle call services like Linkedin, Craigslist, etc.
YES - we have hired out of Flatiron school. A total newbie who goes through the program can't come out as a full-fledged developer, but we have brought them in as QA/Automation engineers and then promoted to developer after 9-12 months.