Two Months Working Remotely From Dubai: On Nuance, Energy, and Engaging Without Judgement.
I have been working remotely from Dubai for two months now, and I have stayed considerably longer than I originally planned.
Before anyone asks: no, it is not the tax. I am still a UK resident, still paying UK taxes, and still explaining this to people at networking events who assume otherwise.
The reason I have stayed is more interesting than that, and it is worth writing about properly — because Dubai is one of those places that people back home have very strong opinions about, usually without having spent meaningful time here. And my experience has taught me something that goes beyond this one city.
What the energy here is actually like
Dubai is the only place I have been where expats from all over the world are the majority. That single demographic fact creates an atmosphere that is genuinely different from anywhere else I have worked.
Almost everyone here chose to be here. Almost everyone left somewhere else to build something — a career, a business, a different life. That self-selection produces a particular kind of energy: people dream big, build fast, want to connect, and collaborate with genuine warmth. There is a collective drive that is hard to describe until you have been inside it — to work hard, earn well, support families, and build a better life. The hustle is real. And it is contagious.
The networking culture reflects this. In two months I have had more spontaneous, generous, “let me introduce you to someone” conversations than in some entire years elsewhere. People here are building, and builders recognise each other.
The polarisation problem
I know Dubai is polarising. I hear the critiques from back home, and some of them land — there are real and serious questions about labour rights, about sustainability, about the model of development the city represents. I am not dismissing any of that.
But here is what two months on the ground has crystallised for me: few places are all good or all bad, even though it is much easier to see them that way. There is always nuance. There is always context. And the people who engage without judgement — who come to understand a place rather than to confirm what they already believed about it — consistently learn more than the people who do not.
This applies well beyond Dubai. It applies to how we think about any place, any culture, any system that differs from our own. The instinct to categorise — good place, bad place, right way, wrong way — is comfortable and almost always wrong. Reality is more layered than the categories allow.
What this has to do with the work I do
There is a professional lesson in this that I keep coming back to.
In customer strategy and proposition design, the biggest errors come from designing based on assumptions rather than genuine understanding. The team that believes it knows what its customers want — without ever really engaging with them, in their context, on their terms — builds products for an imagined user rather than a real one.
The discipline of engaging without judgement — of genuinely trying to understand how things look from inside a different context before forming a view — is the same discipline whether you are getting to know a city or getting to know a customer base. Suspend the assumption. Ask the question. Sit with the answer, especially when it complicates the story you had in your head.
Travel keeps teaching me this. Dubai has taught it particularly well. And every place I work from adds another layer to how I think about the people and systems I work with.
If you are based here or passing through, I would genuinely love to connect. The coffee scene alone is worth the conversation.