I always thought giving a candidate some not very good code and asking them to code review it gives more of an insight into their ability than the leetcode style stuff
Not sure If you'd count it as a bootcamp but I did something similar.
I taught myself to program Basic aged 11, using the manual that came with the early 80s Dragon 32 home computer (a whole 32k of ram). Wrote some simple games, worked out you couldn't really do anything cool without knowing assembly language, completely failed to learn assembly language, as it was too hard for this 12 year old on his own, armed only with a copy of https://colorcomputerarchive.com/repo/Documents/Books/6809%2...
By the time I was 13 I'd given up programming and basically barely touched a computer for the next 15 years, did a History degree, bummed around as a musician for a few years and then, courtesy of the UK dole office, did a 3 month, 5 day a week, 9-5 course in Visual Basic, followed by a 3 month work placement. The company I worked for employed me when the placement came to an end and I've been working as a programmer for the last 25 years - although the last Visual Basic I did was about 24 years ago...
I think I was lucky that I hit the London job market as the first dotcom boom was starting, it seemed to be pretty easy to get a job back then and no one seemed that bothered if you had a CS degree or not. (I still don't have one)
I have done some academic CS courses (via Coursera) and did learn some interesting and useful stuff - but I think the most important thing to have if you want to be a good programmer is to have a self-directed mindset, you have to want go and figure stuff out and be able to learn on your own, using what ever resources you have to hand.
One of the things I like most about programming/software engineering is the fact that there is always more than one way to solve the problem, always scope for improvement and inovation
