You're right, you're probably not gonna go from rando 18 year old who has only ever used an iPhone for their computing needs to even someone who can do even the "college intern" grunt work of a software dev team.

The typical on-ramp in our industry for someone like that is to come up through the help desk or data center where you do get to pull wires, carry supplies, rack and stack, manage inventory, etc. And probably this is where many apprenticeships would begin, too, if the person had literally no prerequisite knowledge.

But the bootcamp system to create devs directly is also fine. I'd just love to see more worker-oriented structure around it so we don't have cheapass bootcamps flooding the job market with people that perhaps have the bare minimum skills and only on paper. Or predatory bootcamps locking people into jobs at shitty companies that teach them awful ways of working that their next company has to undo.

It really, really, really doesn't take a 4 year Computer Science degree from a university to work a typical software engineer job. I've worked with folks with no college education, history degrees, electrical engineering degrees, etc. Folks that have come up through the help desk, through the data center, through bootcamps, etc.

Let's make that even easier to do.

Certainly I'm not suggesting that IT-related majors should be removed from universities or anything like that. Just that the main path into the industry shouldn't cost dozens of thousands of dollars and take several years of an adult's life.

We've already got all of these other, cheaper, faster paths into the industry. What if they were better? What if they were more popular? More available? How would that change the industry? Change society?

You seem to suggest it would be a bad thing (or maybe I'm misunderstanding), can you expand upon on that? I'm not sure I'm following.

Are you saying entry level positions will be monopolized by recent high school grads and no one else will be able to get jobs? If so, are they currently monopolized by recent boot camp grads? Recent college grads? Is one necessarily better than the other? Or necessarily worse?

Does a kid graduating from a trade school and scoring a job on a help desk, studying on the job for a CCNA, and moving onto the network engineering team take any food out of the mouth of the slightly older kid graduating with a CS degree and starting a job at the same company they did their internship? What about the 35 year old tired of working at the mailroom of a law firm who signs up for a bootcamp where a contracting company will pay them for the duration of the training and place them in a job with one of their clients for one year?