my first job in computers was 13 at a local college and I got so much crap from the it team there for being too young and not having enough experience even though I was hired because nobody there could write code well enough to parse dirty data from spreadsheets to pass into spss.
most of my family has a degree and some even teach, but I found it tedious and uninformative and always ended up the teachers pet, helping fellow students, which was fun, but I wanted answers to My questions.
I found the best way for me to learn is complete immersion in a subject, 24/7, read about it, write about it, if it's a language write in it, if it's a technology use it for everything possible and potentially possible. at the outset if you can get answers to the starting questions then that is useful (like training), but once you move out of the basics, in my experience, you will only progress to higher levels by answering your own hard to answer questions, and if it's easy to find answers to your questions, you're not there yet.
break things all day long and then fix them has been my learning mantra for many many years and like the parent poster, I've surpassed pretty much everyone who I've known with a degree in CS.
