Short answer: no.

You probably know someone who got hired in tech with just their portfolio. They're self-taught, self-made, and the idol everyone points to. Taking a tech boot camp can be a good start to becoming this, but if you aren't someone who develops in their own time, you will never be hired on your portfolio. Boot camp alone will not prepare you for this. You need to be someone who eats breathes and sleeps code. Try reverse engineering a few projects from other programmers to see if you can figure out how it works. Take the remote apart and see if you can put it back together.

Boot camp will give you the very basics of a few programming languages. You will graduate with a portfolio, but not one that demonstrates sufficient skills to get hired. It would be like applying to be an engineer with a Lego set you created. You learn through guided examples that will be cookie-cutter as portfolio pieces. There may even be a chance that the recruiter who sees your job application has seen those exact examples in other job applications. This goes back to what I already said about making it your passion to code on your own time. If you want to be a self-made coder, having your hand held through these examples can be a good start, but then it will still take a great deal of time and effort on your own. You will have to develop your own projects and demonstrate more advanced and integrated skills.

It's sorta like college. You go into debt hoping to get a job, learn less than what you expected, and then don't get the job. Actually, a computer science degree is one of the few useful degrees left and it would be far more attractive in most tech fields than a boot camp certificate. Furthermore, a comp-sci graduate is left with a more extensive skill set. Typically, the shittier boot camps will make you take out a loan rather than accepting payment upfront. So, boot camp is not as big of a scam as college because you learn the fundamentals of what you will ultimately need to learn and the price tag is much lower. However, it is similar.

If you really want to learn to code, you don't even need the boot camp. There are a million resources and tutorials out there. You may even be able to find the curriculum of a boot camp program and just do it on your own without paying the school. Many of these programs use material from Coursera or Udemy as their main curriculum, so you could quite literally do them on your own without spending nearly as much money. It may be a bit of a challenge to figure out where to start, but you could always consult forums or even the dreaded Reddit for guidance with this. There's a community for everything if you need it. Do some research on what is in demand and learn it before it is no longer in demand. But like anything else in life, you are ultimately on your own and the sooner you realize that, the better.

There's a term for this: STAR - skilled through alternative routes. There are many ways to become a STAR and supposedly they are a growing portion of the workforce. You may want to consider internships and apprenticeships if this is an option for you, though not everyone has the time and money to be doing this. Paid internships are not unheard of in tech but they tend to prefer people who are still in school to those who went to boot camp.

I'm making it sound like boot camp is a long road to nowhere but it isn't necessarily going to be that. All I'm saying is that it won't get you a job and you don't necessarily need it to build employable skills. But let's talk about the positive aspects of boot camp. Some people thrive in a more structured environment and boot camp will give you this. There will be deadlines and some level of guidance through your coursework. You will have the opportunity to speak with teachers and counselors throughout the whole process. Some boot camps have talks from professionals in various fields in weekly zoom meetings. Some boot camps offer benefits equivalent to employee insurance for the duration of your time in the program. You may even find your peers helpful. You will certainly grow your contacts on LinkedIn, which is a big component of many of these programs.

Some candidates are using a boot camp to supplement an already well developed skill set. Some have experience or connections that will benefit them in their job search. A very fortunate few candidates will get high-earning jobs fresh out of boot camp. The results advertised by these schools are rarely true to reality.

I'm not here to tell you what to do, I'm just letting you know you can probably save yourself a few thousand dollars on your journey to entering the tech field. But if you aren't passionate about what you are doing, don't even bother going through the motions because you aren't going to get good results.

Over and out.