Really thinking about a career change, is a coding bootcamp worth it ?

Hi, I have some comments that I'll kind of put in bullet form to be a bit more succinct * A lot of people move from accounting and music into tech, some of the abstraction in doing books comes in handy! * If you are still working full time as an accountant and are not in a rush, a part time masters at top 10 CS school could be good and open up "new grad" opportunities via the school. If you really have like 1-3 years, and get get into a truly top tier masters program, this might be a good option. * There are no bootcamps that have a high success at placing a MANGA. There are people here and there, but they are a fairly small percentage right out of bootcamps. People do tend to make it to FAANG in a couple years+ and that's a more realistic goal. Mid-tier and lower-tier companies are the most common outcomes. At Formation (disclosure: co-founder, not a bootcamp, NOT recommending for you, discussing because of FAANG connection), we work with people with 1+ years of work experience already to accelerate that transition to FAANG for people who started out lower. I'm obviously bias, but I think most bootcamp grads with 1 year of work experience under their belt can get to FAANG-level with Formation's help. We updated our numbers last week, just under half of our engineers have done a bootcamp in the past, and 81% of all people placed were at top tier companies (25% were at literally the five F-A-A-N-G). So we tend to see that people from bootcamps need a bit of real work experience before being FAANG-ready for the most part. So to summarize: it's possible to get MANGA jobs out of a bootcamp, you'll hear about a handful of Codesmith people going to Amazon and Google, and a couple of Hack Reactor grads going to Dropbox. Each person has a unique path and the overall truth is the vast majority of bootcamp grads don't go to FAANG directly, with zero starting work experience. * That said, a "top 5" bootcamp is a good way to reliably get a foot in the door first job and might be a lot faster than a masters program. In my opinion, the ideal bootcamp target for most people is apprenticeship job at a top tier company. Sure, you make like $100K for that first 6 months or so (which lowers the bootcamp's outcomes reports), but you'll learn faster and transition into full time faster. Super competitive but that to me is more ideal than a bigger salary at a 2nd/3rd tier company. Codesmith advertises mid-level/senior jobs that is a bit misleading (they aren't using FAANG-canonical leveling) that I strongly disagree with, and if you go there (it's a top school definitely worth considering) I would still recommend the above strategy: target apprenticeship at FAANG.