[BoneZone]

Wow, this story sounds familiar to my own. Moved to NYC 15 years ago and worked in Service (Server, Bartender, Manager) after about 8 years in, I applied to college at CUNY. Went to engineering school part time for 4 years while still working at a bar (6pm-5am 3 nights a week) until I finally just took out loans to finish the last two years.

Graduated with a degree in computer Engineering at 33. During and after school I worked in web doing frontend, then full stack engineering. Now I'm senior at a cloud HPC company designing and implementing things beyond my imagination.

I can 100% testify the soft skills learned from the service industry give me a competitive advantage in tech.