Sometimes, if all you know is how to use a hammer, everything will look like a nail.

That's the impression that I got from working with several bootcamp graduates. Most people who enroll are usually people who think that there's a lot of money to be had being an SWE. However because usually bootcamps are 3-6 months max you're just being taught how to use a specific tool to accomplish a general use case that's already been solved many times. However, as an example in my workplace, we deal with a lot of R&D PoC projects and develop our own internal solutions due to security or law requirements from our clients. So if you're stuck when working in one of our projects due to something, there's no post related to that in StackOverflow.

In one case, during development I found a bug in one of the third party libraries that we use and after creating an issue in their GitHub, even the library's maintainer is stumped. We decided to create a new internal library that solves the specific problem we're having.

If you're a bootcamp graduate working on that kind of project, it can be shocking.

Having a college degree can help set up your mindset work in a software engineering project.

Although it's not necessary, because I've known a lot of great dev with no CS degree. But it'll take a lot of time working in projects with a lot of different cases. Maybe it's just that my workplace doesn't really have a suitable kind of project for people with not a lot of experience. However lately we've hired a lot of fresh grads with good grades and it's been a breeze when onboarding them to our engineering standards.

We've had several hires from bootcamp but there's only one who's a good engineer.

Take this with a grain of salt though, as lots of people can testify that they had a good experience with bootcamp grads. So maybe I'm the one who's unlucky. YMMV.

Not necessarily "wrong" but a weakness is that they tend to focus on concrete language syntax and skimp on abstract software design, and data structures and algorithms. The result is a programmer who knows how to write code, but may struggle on larger projects or more complicated problems, compared to a computer science or software engineering graduate.

Of course I've met developers from applied courses and boot camps who are driven, passionate, and gifted who have gone on to make excellent system designers and software architects, but generally speaking, knowing how to code alone does not make one a software developer.