I was a chef until 2005.
Then a first job in IT, as a server administrator, and twenty-one years since: schools right across Northern Ireland, a Wall Street bank's command centre, and now Telefonica Tech, on the infrastructure of the new National Children's Hospital in Dublin. No degree. I taught myself, and I still do.
At home I do the same with different kit: a bass, an Arduino, and a telescope I couldn't set up perfectly in a back garden, so I built software to measure what was wrong instead. Most of it I build with Claude, and the diary keeps an honest record of what worked and what didn't.