Self Taught vs. Bootcamp vs. College: Computer Programming

Boot camps are a scam. They exist to create female women-in-technology diversity hires. The women all get hired, no matter how incompetent, and only the top men get hired. They teach you by rote and don't teach you the overarching understandings that will make you worth hiring.

Self-taught is best right now. You can learn everything you would in college on your own. You can find out what textbooks they use for the college curriculum, buy them used, and work through them yourself. You can also cut a lot of shit you don't need to know unless you specialize in a certain subfield within programming.

If it were a few decades ago, when university was less of a shithole, going to college for CS would have been better, as it would induct you into a community of elite technologists, i.e., the faculty. A lot of tech lore, like the jargon file, comes from the MIT AI Lab environment, which was the place to be in its day. Now, it's a woke shithole.