I graduated from Dev Bootcamp in San Francisco a couple months ago, and have since been working at SaaS startup in the city. My background prior to the bootcamp was in business and finance, so it was a big career jump.
The variety of backgrounds and skill levels are enormous so it's honestly hard to say if a bootcamp is better for you vs. just learning on your own. There were people in the program who really could have just learned all the material by themselves - they were very quick learners and even had experience in programming. There were other people who couldn't fully grasp the subject matter even after going through the whole program.
Also the people who got the jobs they wanted after the program had to take a lot of initiative and put a ton of effort to overcome the 'Imposter Syndrome' of feeling like we weren't ACTUALLY coders and couldn't compete with some of the more traditional programmers in the workforce who had majors in Computer Science.
More than the material itself, Dev Bootcamp's big takeaway for me was helping us be comfortable with confusion and having the confidence to fight through and try to understand things that we had never seen before. 9 weeks doesn't sound like a long time, but when you are faced with something brand new and confusing every single day, surrounded by others in the same boat as you, and have the resources around you (teachers, coaches and Google) to fight through and understand the material, you come out of it really having the confidence that you can learn anything with some effort and time.
As an example, the entire length of Dev Bootcamp was focused on Ruby on Rails, but for our final projects my group made a client-side web application completely in JavaScript and HTML5 using technology we didn't learn in the bootcamp at all. The bootcamp had drilled a level of confidence into us that we could pick up any technology (something common in the actual workplace), and that was a level I couldn't seem to get to on my own using online resources.
The variety of backgrounds and skill levels are enormous so it's honestly hard to say if a bootcamp is better for you vs. just learning on your own. There were people in the program who really could have just learned all the material by themselves - they were very quick learners and even had experience in programming. There were other people who couldn't fully grasp the subject matter even after going through the whole program.
Also the people who got the jobs they wanted after the program had to take a lot of initiative and put a ton of effort to overcome the 'Imposter Syndrome' of feeling like we weren't ACTUALLY coders and couldn't compete with some of the more traditional programmers in the workforce who had majors in Computer Science.
More than the material itself, Dev Bootcamp's big takeaway for me was helping us be comfortable with confusion and having the confidence to fight through and try to understand things that we had never seen before. 9 weeks doesn't sound like a long time, but when you are faced with something brand new and confusing every single day, surrounded by others in the same boat as you, and have the resources around you (teachers, coaches and Google) to fight through and understand the material, you come out of it really having the confidence that you can learn anything with some effort and time.
As an example, the entire length of Dev Bootcamp was focused on Ruby on Rails, but for our final projects my group made a client-side web application completely in JavaScript and HTML5 using technology we didn't learn in the bootcamp at all. The bootcamp had drilled a level of confidence into us that we could pick up any technology (something common in the actual workplace), and that was a level I couldn't seem to get to on my own using online resources.