After 10 years in the aircraft industry and 30 odd years in the computer industry I retired and took up this interesting and sometimes challenging hobby. Initially it was to create an Internet Radio for use in France but then moved onto very basic robots. Now I am into SBCs and using ESP32 and ESP8266 for odd tasks around the home.
Hi, welcome to the forum. It sounds like you will be able to make some contributions with that experience.
First computer 1959. Retired from my own computer company 2004.
Hardware - Expert in 1401, and 360, fairly knowledge in PC plus numerous MPU's and MCU's
Major Languages - Machine language, 360 Macro Assembler, Intel Assembler, PL/I and PL1, Pascal, Basic, C plus numerous job control and scripting languages.
Sure you can learn to be a programmer, it will take the same amount of time for me to learn to be a Doctor.