edit: Thank you all for the good comments.
I've spent the past 5 years aimlessly freelancing, and my family is thrilled that I've finally done a big thing by entering into a coding bootcamp in search of full-time employment, however I might have to further disappoint them by dropping out.
It's so expensive and it's such terrible education. The instructors are shockingly amateurish and unprofessional. The bootcamp is supposed to help land jobs, but all of the instructors are just a year or two out of this very bootcamp, which reveals the ineffectiveness of their job placement claims.
I also thought the bootcamp would be able to accommodate more advanced students like myself, but instead I've just sat here for a week (worth over $1.5k) hustling on my own project without any guidance at all because the teachers are training complete beginners.
Instead of shelling out a ridiculous amount of money, I could drop out and go back to the self-learning that I've become disenchanted with over the past 2 years. I'm scared that I'll return to the aimlessness that defined my life before. That is definitely what my family will expect me to do. But I feel determined to save money on a fruitless endeavor and make a much more effective decision, for example, by torrenting Udemy courses and building my skills and portfolio that way.
I'm a senior engineer who's been in this work for a decade and also started off without any formal education.
Drop out. But it's a good thing, so don't beat yourself up over it.
If you can lead your own learning then you don't need them, and here's the truth to dev work and being successful: you're going to have to lead your own learning for ALL OF IT. Forever. When you get more entrenched you'll probably have some good mentors to give you pointers but you're still putting in all the work learning yourself. Learning is the most valuable skill a developer can have.
Drop out and build your own project. My strong suggestion: laracasts.com. They cover basics and all the way to advanced Laravel development. I used this exact course to take myself from garbage PHP spaghetti code, to building my first big Laravel project, to making a portfolio website, and getting my first developer job.
Send me your email in a PM and I'd be happy to call or chat or email with you. If you have questions going through laracasts I'm happy to help.
Getting your first dev job with a decent project or two under your built isn't that hard. It's not going to pay great and the work will sort of suck, but it's all relative. I loved my first dev job because it was such an improvement over the first shit jobs I had, but in retrospect I hated it and would never do it again.
Also: I am actively searching to get out of development work. It's not for everyone, and something I've had to learn in my life is that if I'm not drawn to it then don't force it. Dev work sounds nice on paper and paycheck but it's not for everyone, and you're going to wind up hating it if you're forcing yourself to do it like I did. If you've been spinning your wheels on it for years then it's probably an indicator you should be looking into something else.
Thank you. I appreciate the offer to send you a PM. Lots to think over, I'll get back to you.