Just spoke with recruiters from four different major companies. They are filtering out bootcampers.

This is true for big companies but it's not new. Most big companies do not hire directly out of bootcamps and I can tell you why from my experience 8 years at FB as a principal engineer! So first off, where do these applications go: 1. Apprenticeships! Big companies often have apprenticeships/emergent talent/etc... programs for bootcamp grads who come from diverse backgrounds. 2. During the boom times, Amazon would interview anyone with an online assessment and passing that would usually get you an interview. So people with very little SWE experience but who had good professional experience to talk about in a behavioral interview, could pass. Google briefly was talking to bootcamp grads via a number of contractor recruiters at Randstad but you had to get connected through them directly. Second, why don't big companies want to hire bootcamp grads. Unfortunately they DID in the past. Big companies trying to increase their diversity internally found bootcamps very appealing. Hackbright, a women-focused bootcamp, for example had ins with most major silicon valley companies. The problem was only a handful of graduates would pass the interviews and then people generally needed a lot more support in their first months/years on the job. The handful I know hired at Facebook eventually had great careers but it was a huge investment on Facebook's part. They wasted hours and hours of time interviewing people who weren't qualified and it frustrated the interviewers. Then teams with a bootcamp grad on them were frustrated at how long it took the person to ramp up compared to a Stanford/Waterloo grad. So who is getting hired now? Well Codesmith is a good example of a program where the majority of graduates's resumes trick many recruiters into thinking the person is experienced when they aren't. This alone gets through that "bootcamp filter" and if you are strong enough to pass interviews, you might be able to get the job! However that's by no means the end of the journey because you aren't qualified for the job to begin with and many people who skipped a level this way spend hours a day secretly trying to catch up and many people switch companies to a lower tier company 1 to 3 years later. NOTE: a number of people DO FINE AND MAKE IT! I'm sure people will comment here saying so. But if you run the numbers at scale, many don't make it. So we are left with a dilemma here. If you identify as a diverse candidate and are very strong at DS&A -> go for major company apprenticeships. If you aren't you can fake it a little more upfront and feel the pressure every day, or you can be honest and continuously network to try to find the best opportunities. At the end of the day, bootcamp grads have no experience and are saturating the market, so what do you expect companies to do? They see 1000 applications in 2 days to entry level roles and 600 of them have the same bootcamps on them and otherwise look not different from each other.