1. What's your goal of learning to code? If you want to be a professional software engineer (which you may or may not need more data to decide), then perhaps some kind of education is necessary. Bootcamp can work. A completely new undergraduate obviously works. If your education is close enough maybe you can get into a CS/SE masters program and go from there.

2. If your goal is to have deeper technical conversations with engineers, perhaps you can ask to "pair program" with them if there are engineers at where you work and you'll learn about what their jobs involve.

3. If you just want to be more of the engineers community, then I'd say being able to actually code is not required. You can go to a bunch of different events to get to know more of them. Hackathons, various career/hiring events, board game sessions etc etc.

4. If your goal is something else, then there are other options. There's codacedemy, there's udemy, there's freecodecamp etc. If you want to be more hands on, maybe you can join one of your engineer friends on one of their side projects and let them teach you in that concrete situation.