There's hope: I know plenty of successful mostly-self-taught to entirely-self-taught engineers at great companies. One of the best engineers I know is a former

There's hope: I know plenty of successful mostly-self-taught to entirely-self-taught engineers at great companies. One of the best engineers I know is a former nurse. You have to be incredibly dedicated, be willing to put in many many hours before it seems to click, and try to find good peers or mentors to learn from... But it's doable, and you can get very good in a few years. Don't just do it for the pay or it'll be a hard road through. But if you love technology and think you could love programming, then try it out. Tiny little secret: once you get good enough that you can reliably [make dynamic websites with Rails / write iOS apps / insert technology you're interested in here], try freelancing on something like elance to get experience. You'll probably mess up enough that you'll be making minimum wage or less after the time spent fixing things, but you'll grow your skillset pretty quickly.