rhiever

No offense to OP, but please don't use your GI Bill benefits on something like a coding bootcamp. Please use it to get a real education.

eLife must be selective if we are to encourage submission of the most important work. If we accepted a majority of the submitted articles, we would not attract major discoveries.

Does this not fall into the same trap as Cell, Nature, Science, and the other "luxury" journals? How can you decide what is "important" work and what is not important work? Many important discoveries were not considered important by experts in the field when they were first discovered. Some even to the point that they were not published.

Bootcamps can certainly bootstrap you into a programming career, but (most of the bootcamps I know of) don't teach you the fundamental concepts underlying computer programming. They may tell you a little bit about sorting algorithms and what one to use, but they won't tell you why one is better than the other. They probably won't teach you much about data structures, compilers, and so many important fundamental programming concepts. Most bootcamps focus on learning the languages and technologies rather than the concepts.

I think you can become an OK programmer by going through a bootcamp. But I don't think you can become a great programmer until you really understand the concepts underlying the various programming languages, and what those programming languages are abstracting away.

My interpretation of Michael Eisen's message is that he wants to dispense of journals as we know them, but not journals altogether.

He is more a proponent of post-publication peer review as opposed to pre-publication peer review, and argues that having a select few reviewers determine whether a manuscript gets published is damaging to the publication system. This is why reviewers and editors for PLOS journals are encouraged to focus on the technical correctness of the manuscript rather than whether it is an "important" discovery. Determining whether a discovery is "important" is left to the readership.

Edit: /u/johnpharmd is correct, confirmed by Michael Eisen: https://twitter.com/mbeisen/status/411239016861040640

Programming is definitely a valuable and in-demand skill, regardless of how you learn it. My concern is more about the quality of the programmer that bootcamps produce, and the quality of the code that comes along with said programmers.