Is doing a boot camp as someone with no degree a fool’s errand?

You don't need a degree or even a bootcamp certificate to get a good job. Having relevant experience of any kind does help, but even something like accounting can be a good bridge. The thing with Codesmith CIRR results are they have an interesting distribution curve with bunch of people on the low side, and a bunch of people on the high side. Their low side is still good, but there are many people who do Codesmith and make under $100K as well. That could still be a solid first job even if it's not the flashy too-good-to-be-true numbers people share. The other problem with CIRR is it excludes stock and bonuses. A lot of those higher paid engineers are even HIGHER than they appear on CIRR because of that. On the other hand, Codesmith has a lot of alumni placed at Capital One and Amazon over the past year, which are very heavy on base salary and the bulk DOES show up in CIRR. Anyways if you have 3 months to wait for cohort, 3 month in Codesmith and then 3 to 9 months to find a job and you are find with any solid first job, and you are expecting and ready for all of this, then go for it! There are some people more inclined to abstract thinking required for engineering and it's likely those people were drawn to STEM degrees if they had the support and opportunity to do so. So I don't think it's so much the degree that matters, but the natural inclination towards programming that does. I've worked with some very talented non-degree people with very strong natural inclination to programming, who have achieved some of the best outcomes!