This essay doesn't consider institutions or classes that would help someone with absolutely zero programming experience try to prepare for the bootcamp admissions process that the author advocates.<p>While it makes sense to me that the bootcamps should be more cautious about their admissions standards, it still raises the question of what people who have written 0 computer programs are supposed to do when thinking about pursuing a bootcamp. And I guess there are many potential answers to that, but it's a problem quite closely related to this essay's argument.<p>I remember that at Berkeley there was CS 61A for people who had some prior programming experience (not necessarily directly related to the course content) and CS 3 for people who didn't. Bearing in mind that some people who would be interested could not currently pass the author's proposed screening question (implementing a JavaScript function to return the longest word in a string), it seems someone then ought to create the CS 3 equivalent to prepare those would-be applicants to do so. (And maybe that's ultimately an existing free online class of some kind.)