Why do you say that? I mean seriously, you're cutting yourself short. Getting a CS degrees is nothing more than a starting point. After a few years, it certainty won't help you progress into being a better developer automatically. Being a more senior developer is more than just knowing how to create a linked list or reverse a binary tree, and honestly the majority of places have no significant need for that understanding. It's about understanding tradeoffs between technical decisions, its about understanding business, it's about understanding when to refactor vs let it alone. A CS degree will not teach you that, and yes some places will be "snooty" and say we won't hire someone without it. Fine, screw them then. I didn't want to work for them anyway.
Salaries won't race to the bottom, because 1. there is still a demand, and 2. someone from a boot camp doesn't have the knowledge and understanding that a more senior person does. Can they learn that? Of course they can, but then they will become more valuable and expect more money. Companies that hire the cheapest person possible almost always end up at the same conclusion. You pay peanuts, you get monkeys.
Story time. At a previous company I worked with a number of smart people. Education wise, I didn't hold a candle to them. One went to a top engineering school in the U.S., one had a master's degree in CS, and one went to one of the top rated CS programs in the world. (They are all several years my junior.) All of a sudden our boss calls me in a panic, because some update that was done was failing and causing our clients to not submit data. After asking questions about what's happening, level of impact where it was occurring, I briefly look at the error log and say, "There's the problem, and this was the update that caused it." How did I know, because I smarter? No. I had more experience, I've seen more things. I've solved more problems. Their degrees didn't teach them anything about how to handle that situation. This is why not having a CS degree isn't a death knell of a career, and new people entering the field aren't either.
Salaries won't race to the bottom, because 1. there is still a demand, and 2. someone from a boot camp doesn't have the knowledge and understanding that a more senior person does. Can they learn that? Of course they can, but then they will become more valuable and expect more money. Companies that hire the cheapest person possible almost always end up at the same conclusion. You pay peanuts, you get monkeys.
Story time. At a previous company I worked with a number of smart people. Education wise, I didn't hold a candle to them. One went to a top engineering school in the U.S., one had a master's degree in CS, and one went to one of the top rated CS programs in the world. (They are all several years my junior.) All of a sudden our boss calls me in a panic, because some update that was done was failing and causing our clients to not submit data. After asking questions about what's happening, level of impact where it was occurring, I briefly look at the error log and say, "There's the problem, and this was the update that caused it." How did I know, because I smarter? No. I had more experience, I've seen more things. I've solved more problems. Their degrees didn't teach them anything about how to handle that situation. This is why not having a CS degree isn't a death knell of a career, and new people entering the field aren't either.