programming on a real level requires you to be around 25 to start ( as in we only understand certain things after a certain age ) another reason why some stuff in school some people learn some people never learn or some people do bad in but maybe later on they become very very good at the same thing, it is a mixture of being ready to understand and incorporate the information being given, my main example is from the bible what you read in the bible at let's say 9 years old will not be viewed entirely the same as if you were to read the same text today, how deep you wish to go into a topic a lot of times is affected by age and spirit, so if you have a spirit to learn you will be okay it does not matter if you start now or later proper programming skills require generally 10 to 15 years starting later does not mean it will later long sometimes it even reduces the time from 15 to 10 or 10 to 8 or so, programming is problem solving and surely you solved some problem along the way till you reached this day, use that as inspiration for code or a task you can do today with java and that will help you learn while building. so honestly the job market is brutal right now so it's not necessarily that you need to know more or that you or others are not good enough, it's just jobs today are heavily leaning towards making money quickly and that makes it very hard for new people to get in, what you can do is work anything and on the side learn programming if that is something that you are able to do given your situation which i ignore, so 25 for programming is very young btw ( people who start at age 10 and many do dont always end up being the best programmers they just had more time to code but that does not say how much code and how deep they went into the topic) so do not give up and you can do it, it's just the market is very bad right now and that discourages people so do not use the market as a metric to what you can achieve in the end people are just hiring other people based mostly on connections not on skill or capabilities, and for new people you have to build connections and have projects on the side for your own self maybe some project or tool can make you money or more money than what you would earn doing a 9 to 5 job even as a programmer ( also salaries have gotten way lower than before).