Do you still need a college degree after attending a coding bootcamp?

I would argue that employers knew just how green bootcamp grads were well before the pandemic. When I was at Meta, they had a couple of partnerships with bootcamps to try to offer mentors to their students and then also to get first pick at the graduates that they wanted to interview and potentially hire. So few people passed interviews and the people performed so poorly in general that it was frustrating. the engineers who were taking time to do the interviews and the pushback resulted in a lot of these partnerships kind of falling apart. there were a handful of people who were hired and some of them are doing well. years later, but my observation was that these people generally took longer to get past entry level and definitely had a harder time than their peers from top tier computer science schools. This was maybe in 2014-15 and since then some of these companies have set up apprenticeship programs which I think are ideal. they have a slightly lower entrance bar and they are like a long internship that ramps you up over a year so you have more time to settle in and hit the ground running in that entry level role a year later. Apprenticeships worked pretty well until covid. first. a lot were in person and it helped A ton for people who had never been in the tech industry or known a lot of people and took to spend their entire days. just engulfed in the tech world physically and I think I help people read between the lines in a way that is harder online. second, as the market has shifted more senior during the layoffs of covid and then stayed mostly mid-level and Senior. since these apprenticeship programs have not had a ton of support and have either gone away or shrunk. third, there's companies we're interested in these programs because the source of demographic was a lot more diverse than typical computer science backgrounds, so the dei wings of companies found apprenticeships appealing for those reasons as well. and a lot of those efforts have been diminished in the past year or so because of both political pressures and just practical pressures that if you otherwise don't need Junior candidates, this is an expensive way to try to source from a wider net for a small number of role. I have more to say but I time box my answers and this is it for now.

Thanks for adding those details!

It comes from a fruit analogy. A fruit that's not ripe yet and ready to eat is usually "green", like a banana. In this case it means they are too novice or beginning for the job, even if they passed the skills interviewed for or have the capacities needed for the job, they have less experience than a typical CS grad (who has lived in a CS world for 4 years and often had internships) and they don't hit the ground running as quickly - or they apply their capacities to hit the ground running but their gaps become apparent when they try to get promoted because they are putting their all into just getting by. I have one personal example. There as a new employee at Meta I was supporting for a task they were working on and I had no context. The person was super nice, asking a lot of questions, but didn't understand fairly basic concepts. They asked a lot of questions and tried hard but I gave feedback to their manager that they seemed a little behind despite trying really hard. The person was a bootcamp grad and I didn't know beforehand and had no bias. Great person and they are doing great as an engineer to this day, just needed longer to ramp up.