Right. The problem is that it isn't terribly hard to do. It certainly doesn't require a CS degree. Any reasonably smart person can do it after a three-month boot camp. This is why there's a correction on the way.
This is largely true. However, I've been cleaning up and scaling those systems glued together by dilettantes for years. My salary has been increasing, on average, 10-12% yearly for quite a while. I'm in management now and my primary job is to find and manage 1) people who glue together APIs to solve business problems AND 2) people who can fix the problems created by group #1. There is very little overlap between the two.
I welcome more boot camp grads. The amount of work for both groups is growing. I don't see salaries for devs falling. They may flatten out for some business problems/areas, but new and/or underserved will always appear.
Having worked with people coming out of a three-month bootcamp, I strongly disagree. The havoc these people wreak on your codebase for the first 6 months to a year after their boot camp makes them completely counter productive to have around.
Incredibly thorough code reviews helps reduce this, but at that point it slows down the skilled members of the team too much for it to be worth it.
Completely agree. As a boot-camper myself, I would have been an absolute disaster for the first 6 months (really, longer) of my career. It was exactly working with experienced people who had the time to provide rigorous code reviews, and my own desire to learn from these people, that prevented me from totally messing up our codebase and eventually brought me up to speed. But even today, I acknowledge that my knowledge is very shallow compared to anyone with a four year degree. And I think the job security provided by that degree — which comes from the ability to do good work on things besides just web applications — is increasingly valuable as the number of developers increases (even though developers can work to overcome this knowledge gap).
Sometimes it is very hard to do. I am now responsible of a platform that has over a thousand, unique configuration, servers and hundreds of database servers. Putting this together is so easy, it was done by a few guys with no CS degree (not that the degree matters) with a few months of on the job training. It is a mess, it will take about one year to clean up the mess and get it right (for example, just paying the licenses we need on the servers we need will save ~ 60% of the licensing costs). Try leaving a terabyte database on the capable hands of a 3-month boot camp graduate and see how long it will work and how.
There's a definite bubble at the junior level. I feel it will be self limiting as and when the bootcamps start failing to place people and people stop seeing it as a way to easy wealth.
