Recruiter accidently emailed me her secret internal selection guidelines 👀

I'll try to do a quick summary but it's a more complex answer than just this. Bootcamps at a high level are trying to compress programming education into a short period of time. For example 12 hours days for 6 days a week for 12 weeks. The idea is that unlike a lot of industries, you can get into the coding industry with no credentials and just your brain, so if people can accelerate their education, they might be able to accelerate their careers as coders. What happened though was that bootcamps started being judged (and judging themselves) by the jobs people got immediately after. Like X% of people got jobs averaging $Y salary in three months post graduation. Bootcamps are super expensive given their short time, like $1000+ a week in many cases, so they would justify the cost by demonstrating that like 80% of graduates get jobs paying $100K within three months of graduating. This worked when people got jobs! People started pushing the limits by exaggerating their resumes to get higher paying jobs, which jacked up the states, which attracted more people, and people were getting away with it. But since 2023 the job market for entry level engineers has crashed and those outcome numbers have tanked. One of the top bootcamps that tries to still share information had a California 6 month placement rate go from 2021: 90% to 2022: 80%: to 2023: 42%, and the salaries went from about average $130K to $110K. Because the bootcamps justified their fees and existences from those outcomes in good times, they were now feeling the pain because of those same outcomes in bad times. Enrollment stopped, many shut down, many paused, and some are still trying to keep going and trying to spin the story more positively than it is.