I’m Michael. I was a principal engineer at Facebook from 2009 to 2017, where I was the top code contributor of all time and also conducted hundreds of interviews. I recently co-founded Formation.dev, an engineering fellowship that trains and refers engineers directly into big tech. Ask me Anything!

Hey! Good question. It's really hard to generalize, it's like asking "does getting a CS degree prepare you for a SWE career". There are many different bootcamps of all shapes and sizes. Ultimately it comes down to your personal goals for your SWE career and I would want to give you more personal advice. If I were to generalize, I would say that I see a bootcamp as a tool to learn basic programming, in the same bucket as things like the Odin Project, freeCodeCamp, CS50, but with more people around to ask questions to or motivate you. Unlike these alternatives, most bootcamps add an expectation to get a job at the end of them and this is concerning to me because people are uprooting their lives based on this expectation. They don't really work for people with zero experience getting any kind of tech-related job at the end and people in this bucket often continue to struggle planting their feet firmly in that CS career after getting that first job. So in summary, I think bootcamps are a great step in the journey to learning how to program, but I wouldn't do one solely to prepare for a SWE career or expect it to be the final step.