MS Computer Science Degree or 2nd Bachelor's

You can do it part-time.

At the time, I had a full time job and wasn't ready to leap into a full-time educational commitment. I'm pretty risk adverse and the job paid well, so I had been doing the coding bootcamp part-time.

I found it incredibly difficult to do a bootcamp after work-- because the timeline is much more compressed, I was working nearly all the time. Remember the density thing? It's great if your only goal is to learn something, but holding down a full time Project Management job made maximizing coding density quite intense.

I ended up spending 3 full years part-time (a little more if you count the prerequisite classes) on my MSCS degree. It was a slower pace, but I ended up getting several times more cumulative exposure to technology stacks. I also hacked it a bit-- a year into my MS degree, I made the transition in my full time gig from Project Management to Software Engineering, allowing me to optimize learning density then.

This is the route I personally recommend anyone who can muster it for a year or two (learning enough to land a full time dev gig). Most universities will negotiate courseload with you too.

The professors are usually brilliant.

No knock to bootcamp instructors (mine were personally wonderful), but on average they didn't have as much software engineering experience as my adjuncts in the MS degree. Many of the adjunct professors had been developers for 10-20 years (or taught part-time).

The full time professors, on the other hand, always had a Ph.D and contributed to some aspect of computer science. My networking professor was a key contributor to cellular networks, and my thesis professor was a leader in cryptography.

You get really good exposure to math and theory.

Remember the point in the bootcamps section about practical knowledge versus theory? If you're a bit of a nerd like me (I literally run an algorithms/software blog site), Rails and React are great, but I love knowing how things fundamentally work.

It's one thing to know Rails, but my classes in Database Systems, OOP Design, and Programming Languages taught me what the framework was built on.

Note: do you hate math and theory? If so, you will not enjoy a Computer Science degree and should go another route to become a developer. If you do get excited reading wikipedia articles on optimization problems, grammars, NP-hard algorithms, ARM architecture, and the like-- consider this path.

But it can be expensive.

Unfortunately, there's not a ton of graduate school scholarships or financial aid, so you're usually on your own here.

With that said, software engineering is a lucrative profession that I believe will continue to pay a handsome return on investment, regardless of the approach taken to break in.

Best of luck.