I know good engineers who started quite late in life. My experience matches yours exactly. Almost all of the good engineers that started late in life in my exp

I know good engineers who started quite late in life. My experience matches yours exactly. Almost all of the good engineers that started late in life in my experience are just plain extremely smart and would excel at anything they did. One friend that comes to mind wrote his PhD thesis in chemical engineering and then switched to being a software engineer. He is too motivated and too smart to fail at it even though he doesn't have what I consider that intrinsic spark that led him pursue computers at an early age.