Basically agree with this. However, you were able to learn, among other things, Java, Spring, Hibernate... in a year, with no prior real programming experience. That's great. Nevertheless, experience plays an important role in programming, because there are some many different fields that are always linked in some way (eg, you learned Java and do not have to care about C pointers, memory allocation - however knowing how all of that works under the hood (ie like knowing C well) gives a huge advantage when it comes to create structures, guessing the complexity of algorithms etc... As a beginner you will reinvent the wheel a lot... and this is what usually do the young beginners - and that's good because at that age, one is eager to learn, to spend a lot of time on algorithm details etc... Will you?
Don't know about your background, but if by chance you have a degree in mathematics, or if you like (and succeed at) puzzles, riddles ... you get immediately an advantage over the majority of programmers (experienced or not). Most of programmers can produce a very bad code as soon as an algorithm that is a bit more complex than what's done during the daily routine is required - that represents maybe 1% of the programs, in size, but may weight 99% in terms of complexity, efficiency, maintainability etc...
