Here are some thoughts but I fully understand they are my opinions and maybe limited because of my lack of experience in really big organizations and IT departments. Combined with what Zhia wrote hopefully this will create some “food for thought” for anybody that reads this and is considering a career in computer science.
I am a very old software developer. I started almost BC — Before Computers. In today’s world am not sure coding bootcamp can get you all the way to Software Engineer. At least as I understand a Software Engineer’s skill set. I started my career without any formal computer science education. I went back to school later and got a Computer Science degree to make me more marketable but not to learn skills.
Most of my early career was in very small shops building complete applications and special programs. I had to learn everything from scratch including how manually use realtime clock tick interrupts to collect characters out of a communications adapter as they arrived one at a time and pass them to a background task to write them to a file. This was my “do it yourself field developed software engineering” school. I learned how things worked at some very low levels in the CPU. It also honed my debugging skills to a razor’s edge. It also took more than 4 years in this “do it yourself” path to develop a reasonable skill set.
The good news today is nobody would need to use realtime interrupts to collect characters from a communications adapter. Much of what is needed in software development is abstracted away from the hardware and even from lower level operating system tasks. But it still takes special skills.
My impression of becoming a “coder” is to take a predetermined design and turn it in to a module that will likely become part of a larger project. Maybe not always but frequently. This would be more like translating a few paragraphs from Spanish to English with modest Spanish skills and a dictionary. Coding probably would not be like writing a novel from scratch starting with concept and plot development then writing every page starting with a blank sheet. I think Software Engineering is more like writing a novel.
Being a coder would not be a bad job but getting to Software Engineer would be a long journey unless you were lucky enough to be in the right organization that would stretch your skills on a daily basis.
Before I would even recommend Software Engineering or Software Developer as a career I would suggest that you must have good critical thinking skills. Without the ability to “connect the dots” you may struggle with design issues due to the abstract nature of the required skill set. Also being a good debugger is an art more than a science that forces you to think about how the “dots might connect” without always being able to even see the dots you are trying to connect.
If you like puzzles and have good critical thinking skills then being a software engineer might something worth exploring.
But of course as they say “Your Milage May Vary”.
