Personally, I think it's very depressing to see people who want to break into Design (including a handful of my IRL friends) waste their money on bootcamps taught by professionals who haven't accomplished much or whose experience is just a string of <1 stints.

I think it's important to build a *proven track record* of your expertise — and how you've applied it — before you go and tout yourself as an expert. How else do you know if your advice or your feedback is actually high quality?

My portfolio is w/e, with that being said: I'm shocked that bootcamp portfolios have not changed in years. The price of these courses has increased, but the quality and type of work has stayed exactly the same.

2. I considered/was recommended to do some from of condensed, design whatever-bootcamp course, but the sheer amount of money these institutions want in return of a cookie-cutter "new airbnb app" body of work is...fucked.

Boot camps are mostly predatory. They're also very much what you make of them and highly dependent on the actual boot camp—they're not all equal. I know people that have come out of them and managed to start careers as designers, but I also know people who couldn't.