[scoj]

I am a mechanical engineer as well that turned to programming. I only had Matlab and Fortran experience of all things out of school. I would be very honest with yourself whether living in the US on the West Coast is your dream or being a programmer is your dream. These are two separate things and are not necessarily related. Assuming that you want to go into programming, then figure out what type of work you want to do. But if you are flexible and not in the goal is more to live in the US then I would suggest going the web development route. I learned pretty much entirely on nights and weekends doing small contract work what we call moonlighting. Then after several years of that I decided to go out on my own. I had never worked officially as a developer but was able to get my first full-time contract job without showing a resume at all. (It was from a reference.) The thing that I love about the web development space especially is that no one cares what your degree as they only care about your experience and knowledge. If you can build a simple web app that does something and it can be simple and put it out there on a real site then you will have no problem getting a job.

All of this is assuming that you legally can get a job the US.