Phew, that's an overwhelming list. A less exhaustive alternative that I recommend is https://teachyourselfcs.com. It's tailored to those who never studied CS in undergrad, like myself.
I wouldn't say this list is exhaustive, more like a good start. It's missing some of the breadth that you are likely to find in a good CS program. I'm not seeing much in the way of OS, networking, undergraduate machine learning, robotics, software engineering, or mobile application development. Adding the above topics would make this list more comprehensive.
As someone who's been self-learning computer science on the side (I've been working as an engineer for 5 years, but have a bootcamp background, plus I'm just interested in all that stuff), I can't wait to take it.
I plan to take it every 6 months to quantify my progress.
For those that don't know, Recurse Center[^1] is a self-directed, 12 or 6 week free programming retreat in New York City. I'm currently enrolled, and my batch is finishing this week. It's been a really good learning experience, and I'd highly recommend it.
Attending Dev Bootcamp in March 2013 is the best decision I've ever made, it totally altered the trajectory of my career and I'm happier and more fulfilled as a result. I'm not sure I would have been able to make the switch from consulting to software engineering without DBC.
That being said, I'm extremely lucky to have enrolled during the narrow window I did. The entire bootcamp industry is suffering, not just DBC. They've now totally saturated the market with juniors and refused to adapt to that reality by extending and improving their product: they should be offering longer courses, covering more material, interspersing their offerings with internships, and providing intermediate-level bootcamps for engineers looking to graduate to the next level. Today's bootcamp graduates have to compensate for this themselves by continuing to teach themselves new content as they fight for jobs after graduation. This is difficult - don't get me wrong, it's still doable and still very much worth the effort - but it's hard, and this explains the current embarrassingly low rate of bootcamp graduates winning jobs as developers. If this describes you: keep your chin up, find a friend to practice interviewing with, and know that you're going to need to work through this material eventually: https://teachyourselfcs.com. And feel free to reach out to me.
I don't think anyone close to the bootcamp industry would see this as a surprise, and I think we'll see many more bootcamp closures/M&As in the near future. Hopefully the industry will evolve and adapt, not die - everyone deserves the opportunity, not just the lucky few who had it easy before the market got saturated.
I'm already web developer, but I want to move into Software Engineering. I wish there was a bootcamp out there that would train people who already work with JS and coding, but are not as strong in CS. Bootcamp L2, for example.
A few definitely are trying to adapt with the jr dev saturation problem. I went to one in San Diego called Origin Code Academy and they're trying out extension courses and have already succeeded with final project internships rather than letting students come up with their own app. I don't know yet if that'll help them survive but the latter gives their graduates a leg up in the job search.
It might seem obvious to you, but the bootcamp crowd really underestimates the impact of computer science on their day-to-day work. I know because I used to be among them.
At least in my case, I was indoctrinated by my bootcamp to put a standard CS undergrad degree into the same bucket as the rest of our broken education system. So at my first job I focused on keeping up with the trends, trying to master web development by becoming hyperproductive with my day-to-day tools. I was trying to emulate the most visible engineers I saw at conferences, figuring that to shape the trends I'd have to be on top of them. Very naive of me, but then again, I didn't have much exposure to the world beyond web development, and you don't know what you don't know.
I wish I could have seen this post years ago! Would've saved me a ton of time.
I think the problem with asking for anecdotes is that people don't necessarily separate their decision-making-due-to-CS knowledge from decisions they make due to experience. But if you don't have CS knowledge there are many types of projects you'll probably never be assigned or might not even try for, so you won't have the chance to use-or-not-use it.
I can totally see that, but it clashes a bit with self learning and research towards figuring figuring out whatever the problem is, or the domain space. Surely, a self taught web developer wouldn't want to take a job building a compiler for a DSL if they didn't have that skillset, but maybe they know or can learn enough about compilers to be able to track down a crazy bug?
I've always gone towards projects which may need a lot of research on my part, and I've had plenty of trusting peers and managers with hard CS educations who believed I could do it.
If I wanted to change problem domains to something much more grounded in CS (say operating system schedulers, robotics or microcontroller programming) Id read these books.
I'm trying really hard to see what the value is of learning this pattern or that pattern, and what sorts of worlds it can open for me, but so far (for me) it's usually been roads I don't want to go down professionally. Maybe my imagination itself is stunted by my lack of formal education, I don't know.
