Why I Left Everything Behind
I am a software engineer from Cuba. If you know anything about the country, you know that talent there operates under constraints that most developers never have to think about. The average salary for engineers ranges between five hundred and one thousand dollars a month. Some make less than a hundred. A few make over two thousand. I was in the thousand to twelve hundred range, which put me in the upper tier locally.
That sounds decent until you factor in the ceiling. There is no career growth path that leads anywhere beyond another thousand dollars. No equity. No remote work opportunities at global rates. No access to the tools and communities that most of the industry takes for granted. You work, you collect your salary, and you stay where you are.
I decided to move to Dubai. Not because I had a job lined up. Not because I had savings to fall back on. I had very little of either. I went because staying meant accepting a future I did not want.
The Reality of Moving to Dubai
Dubai is expensive. That is not a surprise to anyone, but experiencing it is different from reading about it. Rent, transportation, food, everything costs more than what I was used to. My savings were limited. I needed income fast.
Getting residency in Dubai is complicated. There are scams. There are employers who make promises they do not keep. There are legal gray areas that you want to avoid entirely because being in the country without proper status creates risks that compound quickly.
When the first opportunity came, I took it. It was not an engineering role. It was a waiter position at a fine dining Italian restaurant that was opening in six weeks. The pay was enough to live on. The training period meant I would have time to learn the job before the doors opened. It felt like a lifeline.
For the first time since arriving, I felt relief. A contract. Legal status in process. A path forward.
Learning a Different Kind of Craft
The first days were easy. Theory training. Learning the food menu. Ingredients, preparation methods, wine pairings. It felt manageable, even comfortable. I knew I could do this.
Then they introduced role plays.
Serving tables under observation. Handling questions about the menu. Clearing plates correctly. Managing multiple tables at once. The rules are specific and the standards are high in fine dining. Every step matters: how you approach the table, where you stand, how you present the dish, how you pour the wine.
I hit a wall during one role play. It was the worst service I have ever given. My posture was wrong. My timing was off. I forgot half the steps. The feedback was thorough and deserved.
I sat down afterward and stared at nothing. The frustration was not about the job itself. It was about being bad at something after years of being good at something else. The identity shift is disorienting. You go from knowing your value in one field to being a beginner in another.
Pushing Through
The training continued. Exams followed. I passed them all. The feedback started shifting from corrective to positive. I was marked as one of the hardest working team members on the training cohort.
We started doing shifts at another restaurant owned by the same group. Real service with real customers. The pressure was different. The stakes were higher. But the training had prepared us well.
I am not going to say it was easy. There were bad days. There were moments where I questioned the decision. There were discussions and there were tears. But by the end of the training period, I felt something I had not expected: genuine improvement.
The gap between where I started and where I ended up was visible. Not in the abstract sense of getting better over time, but in the concrete sense of being able to do things now that I could not do weeks ago. That feeling is universal, whether you are writing code or serving tables.
What I Carried Forward
I am still in Dubai. I am back to engineering work now. The waiter job was a bridge, not a destination. But I learned things from it that no engineering job could have taught me.
I learned that skills transfer in unexpected ways. Attention to detail, patience under pressure, the ability to take criticism without taking it personally. Those apply everywhere.
I learned that ego is a liability. If you define yourself by your title, losing the title means losing yourself. If you define yourself by your ability to learn and adapt, you can survive any transition.
I learned that moving to a new country with no safety net forces you to grow faster than any comfortable situation ever will.
Why I am Writing This
A lot of developers share the polished version of their career. The linear progression. The deliberate choices. The clean narrative.
That is not everyone's story. Some of us take the detour. Some of us work jobs we never expected to work. Some of us arrive in a new city with no plan and figure it out as we go.
If you are in a similar position, or considering a move that scares you, I hope this helps. Not because my story is special. It is not. But because knowing that someone else went through a messy transition and came out the other side makes the uncertainty feel less isolating.
Dubai has been good to me. The journey to get here was not what I expected, but it was worth it.
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