[dhairya]

I disagree. We are conflating being smart really with being self-motivated. Also being in the right environment is very important. I do believe that anyone can do almost anything (I'm not going to be an NBA player in my 40s). Certain things though become harder as time goes on given education or industry requirements but are still not impossible - you have people become medical doctors in their 50s. It fair to state that the privilege of time and money also make career transitions far more easier for some folks. But if you are willing to put in the time and effort and stick with it, you can learn anything and make the jump career wise.

If you want to break into a technical field from a non-technical background, the better indicator of success will be grit, perseverance, and self motivation. Learning becomes easier if you are motivated to learn and when its hard still stick with it. I used mentor at a nonprofit web-dev bootcamp that aimed to help students from under-estimated and non-traditional backgrounds (no college education) become software developers. Most of the students did not have traditional STEM backgrounds and were learning to program for the first time. The program was free and deliberately designed to be hard with multiple places where students would be kicked out if they didn't keep up with the work. There were no traditional tests and coding exams. All assignments were project based with a clear deliverables (website, backend database, full stack javascript applications, etc).

Most of the students (over 80% graduation rate and 99% employment rate) who finished the program got well paying dev jobs (avg salary of 90k). Of the students I mentored, the ones who were most successful were the one willing to put in the extra hours to learn and ask for help (often doing 80-100 hours weeks of learning) and genuinely curious to learn outside of the scope of the curriculum. At the end of the day the program was not filtering on general "intelligence" (whatever that means) but really the perseverance of students to put in the work and produce something each week. At the end of 8 weeks