When I was a kid, my mom was teaching high school, and thought that she might get laid off due to declining school enrollment in the rust belt. She took a year of programming courses at a community college. The next year, they asked her to teach the course, which she did.
Most of her students were 30+, many were working in the auto industry, including assembly line workers. At the time, there were a lot of bright people working the lines because it had always been possible to skip college and land a decent middle class job at the car plants. But that was coming to an end.
Her students were taking one year of CS and getting hired into reasonably decent programming jobs.
In fact, I was also interested in programming, and learned it in school. When I went to college, my mom discouraged me from majoring in CS because she literally thought programming was too easy to justify 4 years of classroom training, and she thought that the job market for programmers would quickly saturate.
Let's just say we guessed wrong. ;-)
But at the time, college level CS was still maturing as a discipline. Many of the 4 year colleges didn't have full blown CS major programs. I'm betting it's harder now, but I honestly don't know if programming per se has fundamentally gotten any harder.
Edit: Noting some of the comments, I certainly don't want to disparage the CS degree. After all, I majored in math and physics -- hardly a turn towards a practical training. I think these are fields where you have to be interested enough in the subject matter, to study it as an end unto itself. Being able to do actual practical work in a so called real world setting is always its own beast, no matter what you study.