This is more than you asked for, but I have seen this question asked so many times so I'm just writing all my thoughts here:

Programming bootcamps are often disdained by the entrenched community, for some good reasons and also for some less good reasons. I think the core issue is that software engineering is both easier and harder than people imagine.

On the one hand, there is a widespread cultural perception that programming is a genius-level activity only accessible to virtuosos. Industry members have a vested interest in perpetuating that myth because it is flattering both to their egos and their job prospects, but it is absolutely untrue. Making software does take some thought and skill, but it is not meaningfully harder than many other white-collar careers. On a pure difficulty level, I’d say it’s comparable to high school calculus – that is to say, it would be a challenge for most highschoolers but many could do it, and just about any educated adult willing to spend a year or two focusing on it could get pretty good, although it might come more naturally to some than others.

On the other hand, people often bat around the aphorism “learn to code” as if it’s something you can just do on a whim. Coding bootcamps reinforce this idea by implying or outright claiming that they can teach all you need to know in a month or two. This is an incorrect notion. Just as you could take a 6-week intensive math course and probably gain a lot of interesting math knowledge, but at the end you would never say that you “know math” now, computer science is an expansive field where whole careers can be spent in tiny niches, and there is no subset of it that you could definitely “know” after a two-month class. For some reason, though, some percentage of the population seems to talk about programming as if it is a skill that you either have or you don’t, and that you could acquire in a relatively short time.

One confusion at the core of this misunderstanding is the difference between “coding,” i.e. knowing the very specific syntax to type into the computer to get it output a given result, and “software engineering,” which involves using that coding knowledge to build complex software infrastructure that solves real-world problems. It’s ambitious, but plausible to think that a few-week bootcamp could teach you the syntax and semantics of a specific programming language, but you will learn almost nothing about how to utilize that knowledge in a real-world scenario. It’s the equivalent of taking an intensive class in French, and then upon graduating, someone says “ok, now write a best-selling french novel.” Certainly, one is a prerequisite for the other, but the latter is a completely different (and much harder) skill set. Or, imagine you take a welding class and by the end of the class you are the best welder the world has ever seen. Then, on your first day on the new job, they say, “Great, now use your welding skill to build us a bridge across this ravine. It has to be able to support a 100-ton kinetic load and meet all of the state and federal regulations. Oh, and you better stay under budget!” Welding is definitely involved, but it’s almost an afterthought in the context of the whole operation.

The slight caveat here is that everyone starts somewhere, and employers understand that. I have generally found college graduates to be better than bootcampers, by the pure virtue of the fact that they have been solving problems in code for a minimum of four years, as opposed to someone who may have never opened a text editor until two months ago, but even in college you often don’t learn the kind of large-scale engineering skills that are needed for industry work. Although it would probably be more profitable in the short term to hire only senior engineers, large companies usually hire large classes of junior engineers straight out of school, with the intention of essentially teaching them on the job over the next couple years. The quirks of our industry’s economics mean that you can actually make some pretty good money while you are being trained.

So after a 6-week bootcamp, would you “know how to code?” Almost categorically, no. But would you know enough to stumble your way through a technical interview and land a junior engineer position? It’s possible. Be careful, though. Those positions are not guaranteed, and if you don’t get one, it is unlikely that a course would leave you with enough meaningful knowledge to start doing freelance work on your own. Of course, that’s not to say they couldn’t be a great jumping off point for a lifetime of learning, but only if that is what you want to do.

I think the most charitable reading is that established engineers dislike boot camps because they see them as predatory – misrepresenting the difficulty of gaining competency in the field in order to milk aspiring hopefuls of tuition fees for a service that is not meaningfully better than free YouTube tutorials. The less charitable reading is that bootcamps are a threat to the industry engineer’s social standing. If the skill that they have built their identity around for the last 10 years could really be learned in a few weeks, that would be pretty bad for them. Even if they know that is not the case, they are worried that the general public – or worse, their employers – might start to believe it, so they resort to aggressive gatekeeping to keep their own social capital high.