I get the sense that not all programs are created equally. I personally attended Hacker School in NYC. I made the decision because I discovered my interest in programming after I had already graduated from college, and at the time I knew very few programmers. A workshop like Hacker School seemed like a great place to go where I could focus on improving my abilities and surround myself with other people who had similar interests. It worked out great. I'm currently employed as a rails developer at a small company and I love what I do. I can honestly say that going to Hacker School was the best decision I ever made.
That being said, in my current position I've interviewed a number of applicants who graduated from rails specific bootcamps and I've been less than impressed. A lot of them seem to be able to build rails applications but have limited or no ability to write ruby code. We had one applicant with an impressive looking portfolio who couldn't tell us how to reverse an array, despite coaching from us.
I get the sense that a lot of the technology specific boot camps do a lot of hand holding and have the students follow a pretty rigidly designed curriculum. The result being that you have a bunch of graduates who technically built some applications, but have little understanding of how they did it.
So what I would ultimately say, is that the value of attending a 3 month program depends almost entirely on which program it is you're thinking of attending. My rule of thumb would be to stay away from technology specific programs and try to find one that focuses more on concepts and principles.
Of course, this is all based on my personal experience, other people here might disagree, and naturally YMMV.
That being said, in my current position I've interviewed a number of applicants who graduated from rails specific bootcamps and I've been less than impressed. A lot of them seem to be able to build rails applications but have limited or no ability to write ruby code. We had one applicant with an impressive looking portfolio who couldn't tell us how to reverse an array, despite coaching from us.
I get the sense that a lot of the technology specific boot camps do a lot of hand holding and have the students follow a pretty rigidly designed curriculum. The result being that you have a bunch of graduates who technically built some applications, but have little understanding of how they did it.
So what I would ultimately say, is that the value of attending a 3 month program depends almost entirely on which program it is you're thinking of attending. My rule of thumb would be to stay away from technology specific programs and try to find one that focuses more on concepts and principles.
Of course, this is all based on my personal experience, other people here might disagree, and naturally YMMV.