I'm a self taught 36 year old programmer. I've been programming since the late 90s. My first real programming job (where I was actually called a programmer) was in my early 20s (2002 or 2003 I think). so my biggest challenge was always convincing employers that I actually knew what I was doing without a college degree. It was frustrating at first, but now a days, it's a non issue. The only issues I see now a days (fortunately) are just differences in skill sets required. Without a degree, you take a chance on which language you choose to learn and sleep with; theres no blanket degree that at least says, you know something.
Overcoming this; is roughly what I've said on Hashnode in the past. Build build build. Degree or not, programmer numbers are increasingly rapidly - and a big differentiator between programmers is those that write / ship and those that just learn. My resume; my list of shipped projects in production generally trumps any degree I could of gotten. I still regret not getting one sometimes; I know it's hard to work for some of the bigger names in the industry without one; but most would say I make a damn good living for myself without a degree.
That, and learning Objective C hahahaha - compared to Javascript / PHP / C# and other languages I've written in, I still struggle with Obj-C. I can get by, but I'm no pro. And I just haven't had the time to play with Swift...