Some 17 year-old sold a million dollar Perl app a few years ago. Open source means you can have experience (write real code to solve real problems or even just clever toys and prototypes) and prove it easily if you want (public source, contributions to open source projects). My degree is soft/arts (BA), not hard/science (BS). So, I essentially don't have a degree as far as as programming jobs go. The last three times I was hired I was told that there was no competition.
It took me 7 years and nearly daily work/practice to get to that point; and part of it was how few Perl-centric devs there are now. How hard it was is a matter of interpretation. I think I spent 70+ hours once doing nothing but trying to install mod_perl. It was the most miserable and frustrating programming task I ever finished. I also wrote hundreds of small scripts and one-liners that were a joy. If I didn't love Perl it would have mostly been miserable, but since I do, it was mostly fun.
Update: I think LanX has boiled down the answer well.