A Restaurant Manager's Best Advice: Compare Yourself to Yesterday

The first time Omar saw an IDE -- the program where developers write code -- he thought it was gibberish. Letters and numbers on a dark screen. Symbols that meant nothing. Brackets everywhere. He stared at it and thought: maybe this is not for me.

He was a restaurant manager at the time. He had a management degree from Hope College in Michigan. He was born in Tajikistan, grew up in Moscow, and moved to the United States for school. He was good at his job. But if you took the money he was making and divided it by the hours he was actually working, the number told a very different story.

He stayed with the gibberish. It was one of the best decisions he ever made.

The Money Divided by the Hours

Omar does not trash-talk the restaurant industry. He was a manager. He had responsibility. He had income. On paper, things looked fine.

But restaurant management is one of those careers where the paycheck hides the truth. You are there early. You stay late. You work weekends, holidays, double shifts. If someone calls in sick, you cover. If the dinner rush runs long, you stay.

"If you look the money that I was making then and if you divide it by hours that I was working, the number itself does not tell you the amount of work that you actually putting in."

That is not a complaint. It is math. And once you do that math, you start looking for something else.

A Friend, a Pandemic, and an Intro Session

It was the summer of 2020. The pandemic had shut everything down. Restaurants were closed or barely open. The world was holding its breath. And somewhere in the middle of all that, a friend told Omar about a program.

She had friends who graduated and found good jobs. Real jobs, in tech, with stable hours and salaries that actually matched the work. She said the program was eight months. She said it would get him ready for a growing industry.

Omar was skeptical. He had thought about law school before, but that would take years and a fortune. This was different. Eight months. A track record of graduates getting hired. A specific skill set the market was hungry for.

On August 7th, he joined an intro session. Kuzzat Altay was talking about the program. Omar does not remember who else was on the call. But he remembers being inspired. The next batch started September 15th.

"I signed up right for it, and the rest is history."

The Gibberish Phase

Omar started with Java. His instructor was Mukhtar. And for the first few weeks, nothing made sense.

He had never written code. He had never opened a development environment. The syntax looked like a foreign language -- and this is someone who already speaks multiple languages and grew up in two countries.

"First time seeing the IDE, first time seeing Java sentence, first time seeing any of that was just a little gibberish. You seeing things, you see numbers, you see letters, but none of them making any sense."

He thought about quitting. The program had a one-month window where you could leave and get your money back, no questions asked. He considered it.

But he stuck with Mukhtar. And Mukhtar, Omar says, did something remarkable.

"He took the people who never in their life knew anything about code -- some students in our class did not even know how to understand what a hard drive in the computer, you know, the CPU, the RAM, the memory -- and he took those students who never touched anything in terms of code, and by six months they were able to code in Java."

That is the part that matters. Not that Omar was smart enough to figure it out. That someone was patient enough to teach people who started from absolute zero, and get them to a place where they could write real code in six months.

Eleven Out of Twelve

Omar's batch had about 300 students total. They were broken into smaller groups for projects and homework. His group had 12 people.

Out of those 12, eleven found jobs within three months of finishing the program.

Eleven out of twelve.

These were not people with computer science degrees. These were people like Omar -- career changers with management backgrounds, restaurant experience, no coding history. Some of the women in his group had never held an office job in the United States. English was not their first language. They had kids at home.

"I've seen in my group there were ladies who never used computers. They never had an office job in the United States. They've been here probably for a couple years and the English was not as fluent as they wanted it to be. And they had two kids. And on top of everything else, they were able to take the courses. School prepared them. They were able to get the job."

Those women are now working from home. They see their kids off to school in the morning. They see them come back in the afternoon. They are not pulling late-night restaurant shifts anymore. The math on their hours finally works.

Three Raises Without Asking

When Omar started his first tech job, he was actually making slightly less than his restaurant manager salary. That is real. He does not hide it.

But then something happened that never happened in the restaurant industry. Every six months, his company gave him a raise. Not because he asked. Not because he threatened to leave. Because they saw his work and decided he was worth more.

"Since then I already had three raises. Every six months I was getting raised, one after another, without even asking. They saw that I was doing a good job -- here you go, a little more money."

Three raises in eighteen months. Plus full medical insurance. A 401(k). Free parking. A gym membership. Travel opportunities. The things that a salary number alone does not capture but that change your quality of life completely.

The Best Advice Nobody Follows

Every student who starts a technical program goes through the same dark period. The material is hard. You look around and someone else seems to understand it faster. You feel behind. You feel stupid. You wonder if you made a mistake.

Omar went through it. And he came out the other side with one piece of advice that he says matters more than anything else he learned.

"Please don't compare yourself to other students. Compare yourself to yourself from yesterday. Did you learn something new today? Are you struggling? Yes, you will struggle. But that's the best time to struggle, because you're learning, because you're in a safe environment and you can ask questions. And none of them are stupid questions."

That is advice for learning code. It is also advice for learning anything. The person next to you does not matter. The only question that matters is: do I know more today than I did yesterday? If yes, keep going.

Struggle While It Is Safe

There is a second part to Omar's advice that is easy to miss. He does not just say "it is okay to struggle." He says struggle now, while you are still a student.

"Struggle away. The more struggle you go through, the easier it will be when you get a job."

When you are in a classroom, you can ask a question and nobody fires you. You can write bad code and nobody loses a client. You can fail a practice test and try again the next day. That safety net does not exist at a real job. The time to make your mistakes, ask your questions, and feel lost is while you are still learning.

Every struggle during the program is one less struggle at the office.

From One Career to Another

Omar's story is not dramatic in the way some career change stories are. He did not hit rock bottom. He was not desperate. He had a steady job and a decent income.

What he had was a nagging feeling that the math was wrong. That the hours did not match the pay. That there had to be something better suited to the life he wanted.

He found it during a pandemic summer, in an intro session he almost did not join, learning a language that looked like gibberish for the first month. He stuck with it because his instructor was patient, his group kept him accountable, and he stopped comparing himself to everyone except the version of himself from the day before.

Eighteen months into his new career, he had three raises he never asked for, benefits he never had, and a job where the math finally works.

What You Can Take From Omar's Story

• Divide the money by the hours. A salary that looks decent on paper might not be decent when you count the actual hours. Be honest with yourself about what your time is worth.

• The "gibberish phase" is normal. Every beginner thinks the material is not for them. That feeling is not a sign you should quit. It is a sign you are at the very beginning, which is where everyone starts.

• Compare yourself to yesterday, not to the person next to you. The only benchmark that matters is whether you learned something new today. If you did, you are on track.

• Struggle while it is safe. Ask every question now, while you are still a student. Make your mistakes in the classroom, not on the job. The more you struggle during training, the easier the real thing will be.

• Good companies reward good work without being asked. Omar got three raises in eighteen months. He did not negotiate. He did not threaten to leave. He just did the work. The right company will notice.