I've been thinking about bootcamps a lot recently as my wife is attending one and it's amazing to me how dismissive our industry is of bootcamps, while we're totally supportive of "self-taught" developers. People learn in different ways and the fact that we have no problem with people who sat in their basement reading to learn coding but we dismiss people who learn better from lectures followed by labs is bizarre.
As far as my wife's experience, it's a legit introduction to the craft and she'll be able to assemble crud web apps when she's done. It does not make up for experience, but neither does learning on your own or a CS degree.
I find it hard to separate 'self-taught' which generally equates to 'given a problem and time, they can figure it out through their own abilties' and a bootcamp where 'someone guided you to a positive result in a short amount of time, but I still have no idea if you can figure anything out.' It's the same thing that happens with certifications, as you know some are just exams you study and quiz for and you don't develop any real skills or a foundation for real skills. There are some certifications I personally would place value in (Cisco, CISSP) because I have personal understanding of what that actually means. At resume review time? most are ignore at best and concerning at worst if a resume is padded with them.
For bootcamps the general HR person doesn't know what it means, and the technical person on the other side probably doesn't know what it means either. I can't even name the 'top 3 bootcamp programs' offhand even though I have been skimming most HN posts for it. The way I look at resume authoring is that every line needs to provide direct value to the audience reading it whoever they may be and to tell me what you have done before.
As far as my wife's experience, it's a legit introduction to the craft and she'll be able to assemble crud web apps when she's done. It does not make up for experience, but neither does learning on your own or a CS degree.