I made the transition to developer in my mid twenties as a college dropout.
It has been net positive for my life. I've ended up at a FAANG equivalent company (i.e. big company and big salary), I'd describe my outcome as better than average.
Advice is hard to give without knowing your situation. When I entered the industry it wasn't that hard to get a junior position. This is not true today and so trying to enter is much riskier. I regularly help people enter the industry and have seen the barrier to entry raise over time.
I generally see six patterns of success:
1. The person has a network that will take a chance on them because they are a high caliber person (assumes some minimum level of skill)
2. The person has strong IT skills and uses their position within an IT org to gradually acquire coding and cloud (e.g. AWS) skills. They then get a dev job that is primarily cloud related.
3. The person has some other valuable skillset (e.g. accounting) and agrees to work at a startup splitting their time between coding and their existing skillset. Sometimes people need to accept reduced pay even relative to startup salaries to make this work.
4. The person goes back to school then gets a job as a fresh grad. This works fairly well but is expensive in both time and money.
5. The person self-teaches and makes one or more truly impressive projects. I've only seen one person do this successfully. They dove deep into a multi-user collaborative editing program, it showed really great technical chops.
6. The person goes to a coding bootcamp and makes some small projects. The success rate of this seems to drop every year and I don't think I can recommend it. In many ways this is not different from self-teaching except that most people lack the tools to successfully self-teach.