Apprenticeships at top tier companies are fantastic. You'll find they are very competitive and in many cases bootcamp grads compete for the slots.
So they aren't so much an evolution of bootcamps but step 2 after having some initial feet wet. Bootcamps are one way to do that but you can also self teach or take community college courses.
The problem with bootcamps is as you said - Google takes like 10 people or whatever and there are 10,000 bootcamp grads a year.
New DEI pressure from the government resulted in pull backs in a lot of apprenticeships programs making matters worse for bootcamp grads.
So the TLDR: yes - aim for apprenticeships, but you might have to do some courses to even compete for them.
u/HighOptical wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
Hmmm, I see. So, overall it's a good idea and would be a good thing for a self-taught but it's just not likely to ever scale that much to the point that it's not incredibly hard to get in
u/michaelnovatireplied·
Well it won't scale overnight.
While the government DEI stuff impacted apprenticeships, the government also is pushing for MORE apprenticeships for AI, but if it's only a top level directive and it will take a good year or two before we see companies offering those.
I think Google is one of the only big tech to have one of these government approved apprenticeships, so they come out slowly.