Exactly. There's tons of people like that. Not sure how they'd filter them from the rest. There's a lot of careers where it'd be incredibly useful too. Even just basic data munching with awk/sed puts a person light years ahead of people stuck with Excel copy pasta.
I'll say this if it's just for "fun" for someone I don't think it would work that well. I took the first PT bootcamp (I paid) and that was a HUGE undertaking. They are only going FT in the near future until they can figure the other options time wise, so if that person has a day job that would make it tough and if they didn't have a day job I would imagine "most" people aren't going to complete the whole thing anyways. I'm sure a couple of people will squeak through but I don't see that being a huge issue with the course work being on the more difficult side of things especially for someone coming from a non programming background.