I did, several years ago. My soft skills are not top-notch, but they are not bad either, and my qualifications are good enough to get hired at good places ...

I did, several years ago. My soft skills are not top-notch, but they are not bad either, and my qualifications are good enough to get hired at good places ... not just where I currently live. Mostly a big adversarial blob of "cultural matters" ... let's not dig onto that, but shortly put, locals feel uneasy around me. Mind you, if I had tried hard enough, I could have gotten a dead-end-job with low pay and no promotions. Or I could have moved and looked for greener pastures. I decided instead to take my lemons and make lemonade, so to speak, and I opened a business. The cultural problems didn't go away, to this day some of our customers prefer to talk to my sales guy, even when they know they would solve their problem faster by just sending me an email directly. But I don't mind having more time for the the ever growing technical team and technical customer-related work. For brown guys in the north, jobs are overrated.