Bootcamps are selling you something you already have...
Coding bootcamps are great! If you've never touched code before. And you do not have any friends/family/acquaintances/neighbors/anyone who has ever touched code..... Yeah there's really no reason for a bootcamp in 2024. I took my 6 month bootcamp on the MERN stack in 2018-2019. What I learned was that the grandiose projects I wanted to accomplish were, in fact, too grandiose at the time. I had 1 week of experience! There is no way I could build and host an app that allowed you to access the Twitch.tv API and query it in certain ways..... But I knew that would be cool, so of course that was what I assumed I would immediately learn. NOPE! First thing, hello world... just some text. Next thing, a stupid gem game to add on click. Then, an API app for the New York Times to fetch and display news articles.... I totally hated myself! This isn't fun or what I wanted! I wanted an API app that hit Twitch and not NYT! Oh wait..... now that I had the skillset, I could totally just.... do it myself..... And so i did! I wrote the code, found resources online to understand Twitch's API, and used my past bootcamp project experience with hosting with Heroku to get it online. Woohoo! Now I'm a real developer! Not exactly.... I was always a 'real developer', just like my wife is at this current moment (maybe 2 weeks of total experience, so next to nothing), or you reading this article. The ability to have an idea and want to make it reality on the internet is what makes someone a developer, the follow through with understanding all the tech and technique that goes into that project is what makes you a Developer (notice the capital D?). There's a billion different ways to do something, and NONE of them a 'wrong'. Some are 'more wrong', but never fully wrong (if it works, right?). So really, the bootcamp did not do much, besides tell me what STARTER projects to begin in order to learn those fundamental skills. Those starter projects are just 'easy examples' of the specific technology, and abstracting that tech out to whatever project you want is the D in developer. Anyone can make these technologies work if you make a calculator or silly homework project; it's the person that goes beyond that first project and makes a second and third and fourth and fifth....... and on the tenth project (spending what.... 2-5 hours per project? A total of 50 hours, like a weeks worth of work. Split it into 2 weeks and bam you're a bum!) you'll have a firm understanding of the fundamentals of that one technology. Development is the process of trying new things to solve a problem, so there becomes a point where those 'starter projects' go out the window and you are throwing things at the walls of your own real projects! Which is when shizz becomes exciting :D.
TL;DR
Do we really need to spend tens of thousands on a class that shows you these super simple 'hello world' and 'basic' projects, or do we need to shift our thinking kind of like when we rode a bicycle. We didn't see the neighbors going off of ramps and rails and think 'I WANT TO DO THAT', jump on a bike w/o training-wheels, and go do sick tricks... I managed to fall off with training wheels for like a whole month apparently before I got even close to taking my bike off of the neighbors jump. But did that stop young Dan? Heck no! So why does looking at making a personal website (the jumps, berms, rails, etc from the neighbors) and immediately shy away, rather than running to the garage to slap on training-wheels? Start w/ a simple YouTube tutorial, and after 6 months, try making something on your own :D