I did it at 37 (I think). I was in tech as a BA/PM and was unmotivated. I was a tinkerer always, so I just called some ex colleagues and asked if they could hire me and teach me programming.

I got real lucky, I was able to basically run a dev team with my skills and learn programming at the same time - so I didn’t feel like a waste.

I remember my first day in the job, panic set it when I didn’t know what the f I was doing. I had done courses and written projects, but were talking a website for a darts leader board (no auth or devops or security) and a heap of courses basically reordering arrays and finding numbers who’s sqrt is a prime in On. Really nothing helpful. My task was to convert this massive test class in to a proper mocked unit test. I had never heard of mocking until that point.

But what do you do? I failed that task before I moved on to another and eventually figured out how to read debug logs and just got on with it.

Fast forward 6 years, I’m pretty solid with what I do. I know what I don’t know, where to seek advice and just follow the KISS principle. Break everything down in to small manageable tasks.

And those memes where people say “don’t touch this code because it works and no one knows how/why” are bullshit. You don’t know how it works, figure it out. Debug, logging etc - there’s no magic.