Many students don't understand why they go into their chosen fields at first. They say it is "passion for---" when really, it just seems like a stable, responsible profession that their parents approve of. Along the way, hopefully, with the help of fantastic teachers, a true love of the subject emerges, deeper interests within it are explored and uncovered, and a great doctor or lawyer is made. (My own PCP and another surgeon of mine and my dentist are some of these amazing people) There are other versions of this. Artists and musicians who realize they won't make it go into medicine to make money, at their last available second before their ship goes down. The thing is, they learned something from their previous profession... they learned how to really get into a lifelong pursuit with rigor and intensity and invention and purpose. One never loses the need for that once it is activated. These bootcamps are flooded with folks like this- those who crave actual content to sink their mental teeth into, with Actual Masters in the field to help guide them in a more financially (but no less interesting and intellectually worthy) rewarding/viable direction than the direction they had been going in as a performance artist or Morris dancer (the profession they chose as pre-teens). I kid, but seriously. And what do they find at these bootcamps? Decidedly Not That. —No real masters in the field, no deeply engaging content on par with Morris dancing (or Russian Literature, or Political Science, or The Classics, History, or Art), and no hope for anything but the same disrespect upon leaving these "camps" from future employers than they got as Classics MAs or PHDs. They get spat upon like they presented themselves as puppeteers or mimes. This is why the money just isn't coming into these bootcamps anymore. Smart folks hide the bootcamp from their resume, which means they need to hide the associating GitHub repositories (lots of work here, folks). These graduates talk to one another. A lot. They talk about how they are treated at interviews, or even before interviews. They just don't have the money and time to fart around in their new garrett deleting work they have done that might associate them with a bootcamp, making huge portfolios of visually pleasing apps and deeply meaningful contributions to opensource software projects(not that they would not love to do just that, mind you). They need jobs. And they see other barely competent folks working jobs in tech companies who had nothing resembling their education and even coding ability getting paychecks because they got there sooner. That is why they aren't buying the snake oil anymore. It just isn't the "on ramp" these camps make it out to be anymore, even though it seems to have been for a short time.
After this thread ages for a day or so, head over to the Twitter feeds of bootcamp CEOs and directors to hear how they describe this thread as being "all anecdotal evidence of a few who "Don't Really Know What IS Going On"" instead of taking this information in... in a meaningful way and making actual change for the students they already have and the ones they hope to get in the future. That costs too much money and time. Money and time they would prefer the students spend. So these students are squeezed on both sides- by the camps who false promise and the employers who want them to arrive job-ready out of the gate. Jumping up and down and saying it ain't so isn't going to make this un-so.
I think we need to stop degrading people for wanting a job and calling that "just in it for the money". Everyone does a job "for the money". Why should a worker not want compensation for hard work? Come on! We call those people "artists" don't we? And we know how much they get paid. This isn't heading in a good direction. Let's show some vision.