I've only worked with one bootcamp grad, but I've done a fair bit of hiring over the past 15 years, including a number of junior folks.

My main concern with bootcamp grads is that it is not much of a positive signal. My (admittedly biased and unscientific) sense is that you really have to be hopeless to flunk out. The training period is so short that the assignments are necessarily small and limited in scope, so they don't test any kind of tenacity or the problem solving and lateral thinking required as a professional. Granted, University degrees have this same problem, but there at least for a proper CS degree there is some heavy math and theory and exams which over a period of four years will tend to winnow the field a bit more. Plus, if someone has gone through four years of CS assignments, they should be able to show some kind of programmerly reasoning ability and debugging techniques—if they don't at all I think they are pretty easy to write off, whereas someone who has only been coding for 3 months should not necessarily be written off so quickly because they still may need to pass a few eureka moments.

I remember my first year of CS after having been generally obsessed with computers and fooling around with programming for over a decade in HyperTalk, AppleSoft BASIC, Pascal and even C. There was this moment when it just clicked in my head how code was logic manifest. I know it sounds trite, but there really was this moment where I went from thinking of code as a magic incantation to achieve some result to understanding that code can be anything you imagine, and that you can map your very thoughts to code. There was some transformation that happened from years of curiosity and obsession, and from what I can tell a lot of people never pass that phase of thinking of code as magic incantations. I'm not sure what's necessary to make that leap, but I'm fairly certain a 3-month bootcamp will not be sufficient to draw it out for most people.

The other problem with bootcamps is that they are just too visible and attractive to people looking for a good career. I see parallels to Indian outsourcing attempts I was involved in 10-15 years ago. It was apparent there were a huge number of programmers who had no interest in the craft, but went into the field simply because their parents thought it was a good job. 20 years ago I don't think anybody in the US wanted their kids to be programmers, so if someone showed up looking for a programming job they were already most likely brimming with the requisite curiosity to become a passable programmer (even if they weren't a genius!). With the US economy tanking and startup culture being glorified and mainstreamed I feel like bootcamps are the obvious outlet for people seeking the media-fueled romance of being a bonafide Silicon Valley engineer.

All of this is a bit unfair to bootcamps. They may well be the fastest way to learn, and the curriculum may be top notch, but for me personally it's a negative signal. I would be more impressed with a candidate who saved their money and spent 3 months teaching themselves to code using on-line resources. Perhaps that's unfair, but that's my bias. God I would have killed for the web in 1987. Do you have any idea how much Inside Macintosh (the Mac OS API reference) cost? Or a C compiler for that matter?