A lot of bootcampers and bootcamps in 2020-2023 era tout a narrative that their graduates have imposter syndrome, but... do you maybe... think they are just actually imposters? Compared to cs grads

It's both imposter and imposter syndrome. I don't like the word imposter syndrome. So let's use swimming as an analogy. You never swam as a kid but maybe you are a gifted swimmer and have the ideal body shape for swimming and you quickly become an Olympic level swimmer. You aren't an imposter if you perform at that level in a race. If you never swam and have no natural talent or gifts and want to be an Olympic swimmer, you might just not make it. Maybe you play the game, swim every waking second, focus solely on just ine specific type of swimming, go to obscure competitions to qualify and work the system to get into better races, but you don't have what's needed to swim at the best in the world level and you are going to face a constant uphill battle. You see others just make it and you wonder if you deserve to be there. Well some people do have a shot and others don't. SWE is similar. Some people have a natural inclination, past relevant experience. Some people really just don't have a shot. In the former case, the person might have "imposter syndrome" and not have any confidence in their own abilities and need external validation and help to keep going. The later person doesn't have imposter syndrome, they might have no chance and being misled by people talking them they have imposter syndrome is irresponsible. Hard thing is, you as a student don't know and rely on bootcamps to access you andil if your bootcamp isn't taking this responsibility seriously then you are in a tough spot.

No, I did a general engineering program and self taught web programming by doing a startup in college. I worked with a large number of bootcamp grads now later on in their careers, mostly from Codesmith, Launch School, Rithm, Hack Reactor, Full stack Academy, App Academy, Hackbright, and more, so I see a lot of common challenges bootcamp grads face later on. We generally work with engineers later in their careers so these are people that made it. But a couple years ago we worked with people who just graduated from bootcamps too. On the hiring side, at Meta we had tried to work with bootcamps to hire and the people just didn't make it. Only a handful made it and their careers were slower than others so it just wasn't a viable pipeline for new grad hiring. Finally, I talk to a number of bootcamp founders and know a lot about their goals and pedagogies and have a good pulse on that side.

I work with a lot of people who are desperate to find really good engineers. so if this is gatekeeping then we should try to explore why? it's so hard for people without CS degrees to get through. It's easy to say on Reddit that it's unfair and have a pile on, that's not going to help anybody navigate the system. The reality is that there are far too many bootcamp grads that look the same on paper. Codesmith grads coming out with one year of experience on their 3-week long project that all look the same. some of those people are pulling exceptional and some need more time to get there, but it's impossible for a human resource person, a recruiter, a hiring manager to figure that out. imagine your hiring manager and you see a thousand resumes in front of you and 600 of them are bootcamp grads and they all look basically the same. there's just no reasonable way to distinguish between them with the current system. A recent trend is that CodeSignal has been pushing these industry standardized tests to try to score people so that people can be compared a little more easily as a filter. still so many people that score highly that it's not a simple solution, but these assessments are a way for separating some of the exceptional bootcamp grads from people who aren't ready yet. now let's say you're one of the exceptional ones and you get through and you're one of 100 resumes that a hiring manager sees. It's just not reasonable for them to choose the person with no experience versus. maybe someone who worked for 2 years at instacart and got laid off and is looking for a similarly leveled job. there are absolutely a large number of bootcamp grads that will perform exceptionally and have major impacts on the industry, but the current system makes it impossible for those people to consistently surface.