> it still just seems hard to believe that 3 months can compete with a 4-year university degree.
Yes, it is very hard to believe. Impossible, actually.
> Bootcamps, are intense. Students complete 8 hours of work daily
In-class time is not the gauge for college. Students are supposed to spend at least three hours studying for every hour spent in class. On top of that are office hours with the professor, as well as contact with the TAs or study labs.
If my courseload for a semester is Calculus 102, Theory of Computation, Algorithms 201, Principles of Programming Languages, and Computer Architecture, I don't see how it is different than a bootcamp because a bootcamp is "more intense". I don't know how you can get more intense than juggling these five topics.
> Traditional CS programmers spend significant amounts of time on concepts like NP-completeness and programming in Scheme...But it is not directly applicable to what most programmers do most of the time. Bootcamps are able to show outsized results by relentlessly focusing on practical skills...How to use an editor is something that a traditional CS degree program would never think of teaching.
Ugh.
I took a course in OS principles and then one in distributed systems. The first course covered mutual exclusion somewhat, the second much more. I spent quite a lot of time writing complex Java programs that handled mutual exclusion well. Guess what I am doing today, years after that course? Writing a complex Java program that uses mutual exclusion. I only took that second course because it fit my schedule, but it has come in very handy over the years.
Insofar as NP-completeness being "academic CS", I have unfortunately seen too many bugs ( https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3188 , https://sourceforge.net/p/jedit/bugs/3278 etc.) where people did not heed the polynomial growth of algorithms.
They're trying to dumb down what you can't dumb down.
The reality can be seen if you look around a SoMa startup and wonder where all the grey-haired programmers went. Where did those programmers who were in their mid-20s in the late 1990s, programming for the dot-com startups, in an even more inflated market, go? Where are the grey-haired, balding programmers in your company?
And this bootcamp is the answer. Just look at the real estate prices and you know the market has heated up. Naval Ravikant turned down $600 million last year because he said there weren't enough places to invest that. Despite talk of perhaps some cooling since the beginning of the year, things are pretty hot. So get some kid to go to a bootcamp for a few months. They can only get their hands on one real programmer, but they can hire a few of these bootcamp kids to do a few MVP's, or maybe code some features up, which the real programmer will have to fix later.
What happens to these kids later, who have no foundation in what they're doing, who have no deeper understanding of what they're doing?
> programming in Scheme...How to use an editor is something that a traditional CS degree program would never think of teaching.
That's because a traditional CS degree program teaches you to write your own editor if need be. Stallman went to MIT and wrote Emacs, Bill Joy went to Berkeley and wrote vi.
What the hell point is there to teaching an editor? I was using Eclipse with Android plugins a year ago, now I'm using Android Studio. University is to teach concepts which will exist decades from now, not the Javascript library framework du jour.
The ones who will make out on this are the bootcamps, and the companies who can use these kids when the market is hot and will dump them when their usefulness is over. Just like what happened in 2000 (or 2008). You'll see what your bootcamp and two years working at a failed startup amounts to when the economy cools, job listings dry up and the posted ones say "BSCS required". Being able to cut and paste from Stack Overflow and use frameworks other people wrote and extended is not an educational foundation.
There are a lot of strawman arguments on the other side. Yes, the hardest working, brightest bootcamp graduate is probably better than the laziest, dullest person who managed to graduate from some third-rate college and get a CS degree. And so forth. None of that detracts from the point though.