I was thinking more of legal barriers of entry you face when going into business for yourself rather than getting on someone's payroll.

You can do a web dev bootcamp, find clients who need websites, and just get started making websites and getting paid as a contractor (sole tradership). There is no legal hurdle, even the bootcamp is not legally required.

Similarly, you can go out and find businesses who need help with bookkeeping, and just start doing some bookkeeping and getting paid as a contractor. Where I live (in Germany), there is no legal hurdle, other than a few weeks of coursework with a test, as long as you don't do any year-end tax accounting.

If, however, you learn how to do horseshoeing (say someone teaches you on an informal basis), and you go out shoeing people's horses for money, you'll be in big trouble, legally. -- In the U.S. it's a 6-week trade school that you have to do, in Germany it's a 3-year apprenticeship. And the fact that these kinds of legal requirements differ so much country-by-country is a testament to how arbitrary they are.

...now, non-self-employed work is a whole other ball of wax, where there's clearly a problem of qualifications-inflation, and the required qualifications no longer bear any relationship to the skills that will actually be needed on the job.

> I've never personally seen a bootcamp graduate at my job.

Just as an employee at your company, or anywhere in the industry? If the former, then see above, what I wrote about qualifications-inflation. It also may be a reflection of the socioeconomic cluster you (respectively your company) is a part of.

Within my 13 years in software engineering, I've seen more than half a dozen companies from the inside, and I've come across many white collar executives without college degrees. Particularly, the company that I was with the longest and paid the best (a very recognizable brand on the web) had a CTO who hadn't gone to college and in fact had held no other jobs, prior to lucking into the employee #1 spot working for what turned out to be a hugely successful startup. Other example: I once worked with a retail insurance underwriting company where there didn't seem to be any college-trained Mathematicians as far as I could make out.

> > If you want to get into one of those, you better do it while you're young [...], because there's just no way you can afford it when you're a grown-up with grown-up responsibilities and financial burdens

> That is definitely true, but applies all the same to bookkeeping (which also requires an apprenticeship in my country) and college education.

The point I was making is that you either have to decide to do it when you're a kid, or the ship has sailed. The same is not true for being a software engineer.

I know lots of people who became software engineers after not having studied anything related to software engineering. E.g. I had a colleague working at a financial trading firm whose background was as an econometrician, who had never done any programming in college. While on the job, he gradually shifted from Excel, to picking up a bit of R on the job, to taking evening classes in C++ and immediately applying what he learned on the job, to being a C++ developer.

Have I ever heard of a farrier who didn't apprentice as a farrier when they were a kid? I haven't. I know someone who shifted from being a carpenter to being a roofer, but even this is something that they did when they were young, and there are special privileges implying they didn't have to do a full three years on the second apprenticeship. If the 3-year apprenticeship-requirement is legally fully in effect, barring you from entering the trade, it's a very difficult hurdle to clear.