I did this. And I'm one of the more successful people in this endeavour. I studied mechanical engineering from a Tier 3 college in India. I wanted computer sci

I did this. And I'm one of the more successful people in this endeavour. I studied mechanical engineering from a Tier 3 college in India. I wanted computer science but I didn't qualify for the program because of my scores in the exam. I joined mechanical engineering and kept coding as a hobby for the first year. I abandoned it in the second year. The only thing closely related to tech that I had going for me was that I'd just started using Linux in my second year. This was 2007 and I started using Linux Mint 7 Gloria. I completed my engineering with decent scores, but that didn't matter since I could only get a job at a motorcycle factory after some tarnished dreams of studying for my master's. I worked in a factory for 3 years and finally ended up working for a monster who made me loathe the field. I left that field and moved to an e-commerce website that needed a content writer. I had aspirations of being a published writer, having written 2 books, and I thought this was a fine way to segue into the field. I was hired as a content writer for the books team at Flipkart. I joined, and began to love my job. I was more computer savvy than most of my peers already. The others were struggling with some work related to Google Spreadsheets and I took it upon myself to improve the process. I didn't realize what an effect that would have on me. I learnt how to write Excel macros. But that didn't scale for the catalogue dumps we would get every 15 days. So i learnt Python after talking to a friend at IBM, and I built a smallish desktop application using PyQt4 and MySql. It was super fun and I learnt a lot. I left the company because they wouldn't give me a chance to be a real developer, and I worked for a mechanical engineering company called GKN where I began writing small tools for mechanical engineers to use. I stayed there for 3 years and worked myself to the bone. I was in a silo since I was the only developer there. I mostly did Python and React. I eventually moved out, and joined Visa, with a huge imposters syndrome. And as I joined Visa, I also started going to meetups and conferences. It was in this time that I discovered just how good a programmer I am. My salary today, 10 years later, is 400x my first salary. It has grown ridiculously to say the least. Yes it is possible. And no you do not need to pay a thing to pivot. All you need is time, and dedication. The only things going for me were an insatiable need to learn, and an interest in computers.