What do you mean "top performing"?

I've seen some "top performing" code, that I had to just trash... because making any changes to the hack job of top performing "just ship it" people is a nightmare.

I'll give the benefit of the doubt to someone with 25 years experience that they know the difference between a true 10Xer and one who 10Xes by leaving 20X of tech debt in their wake.

Unless a person becomes omniscient after 25years of experience - you can easily miss horrible work.

Bootcamp grads haven't been in the workforce long enough, so whether they can weather the fickle winds of the technology landscape is an open question. That's where the CS degree shows its worth: technologies change but fundamentals change less. Comparison-based sorting is still O(nlogn). You still have to partition and break down large data sets in order to work on them. Time and space tradeoffs will always exist and will need more than a bootcamp education to be able to evaluate properly.

meh - I had basically 2 data structure courses, which is not a "year of classes" since the class met for 1 hour, twice a week for about 20 weeks, and times 2 for that second semester. So I have 20 * 2 * 2 or 80 hours of O notation and heap sorting.

The rest of my CS degree consisted of a lot of stuff I used in class (assembly programming) and maybe I got something out of that. I also took a functional languages course which was taught with Scheme (a lisp dialect) which is a little iffy on practical skills. A formal database class (which was an elective)

So I know boyce codd normal form and o-notation, is that really much of an edge over the bootcampers after a few years?

And to be honest because everyone brings up O notation every time we have this talk I'm pretty sure most bootcampers learn that by looking it up and probably binary trees. Yeah. so I'm really not very convinced from a practical level how much more they're pulling.

It seems to me I was in the wrong classes altogether - the real money at this point is in ML and there's not much a CS degree helps with in that area really - so yea, the fundamentals did kinda change, right?

No. Look around you in any tech organisation and see how much value is generated by the people who code vs. data scientists, and how many software people there are vs data scientists. ML is very popular and the startup ecosystem has latched on to it for funding but the fundamentals of CS have not changed. Sure, there's real money in ML but there's plenty of lucrative opportunities in software development.

Your post somewhat proves my point: you are here (and presumably thriving) in software dev despite taking many courses that you deem only tangentially related, years ago. Whether the same can be said of bootcampers remains an open question, because they haven't been in the industry long enough. Anecdotal evidence from software dev managers I know who have tried hiring bootcampers has been overwhelmingly negative (but they are often comparing BS/MS/PhDs who have spent 4-10 years immersed in various aspects of CS to bootcampers, which isn't fair).