The underlying thesis of the article is that high salaries in the Gulf will outweigh the downsides of working in low-rule-of-law authoritarian states with onerously rigid managerial and social structures, which ... might work out for some folks, but if you haven't worked with Gulf-domiciled companies before I wouldn't recommend signing a long-term contract before testing out those waters.
If by folks, you mean straight men... because I sure as hell wouldn't consider moving if I was gay or a woman. Just this week Ireland had to pressure UAE to return an Irish woman who authorities imprisoned for "attempting suicide" after she was injured because of domestic violence.
Tech is mostly made from men and you don't need to share your sexual preference with anyone, so I don't really see a problem. Make some money and get back.
I was under the impression that for ordinary commercial stuff that won’t touch politics that Dubai at least was pretty tame? Or at least fairly low on the corruption index.
My cousin worked there quite a while back so things may have moved on but 2 experiences he told me where reasons I wouldn't ever work there.
1. His wife was involved in an accident with an immigrant worker. She was fine, they weren't. She tried to insist on the Dubai police calling an ambulance. They flatly refused as they didn't value the immigrant workers life and threatened her with arrest and jail if she didn't leave immediately, on the basis if she hadn't been in the country the accident wouldn't have happened.
2. They and their other friends had pacts that if either couple both died they would immediately take their children out of the country, as otherwise they became wards of the state, which is almost impossible to reverse.
Corruption is rife too but the cultural differences and consequences are if anything more significant.
For most expats Dubai is fine as long as you understand exactly where the lines are drawn and are willing to live within them (it's orders of magnitude more relaxed than KSA; far more restrictive than, say, Singapore; and a world away from Europe), but even then you can find yourself in trouble; doing business with powerful political clans -- and it's hard to avoid doing that at a certain level -- is a fraught scenario. I had one friend whose company went into bankruptcy because of two clients (a senior UAE shaykh and an Indian billionaire) who refused to pay tens of millions in outstanding uncontested invoices.
About that same time another UAE (Nahyan) shaykh demonstrated his displeasure to a business partner by having him driven into the desert, buried up to the neck, and (nonfatally) run over with a Range Rover while being videotaped. When that business partner (an American) attempted to press charges, the Shaykh was acquitted and the businessman convicted in absentia for blackmail.
I've had more issues and fewer legal recourses with Gulf clients and partners than anywhere else in the world (including the Bilad al-Sham/Levantine region of the Mideast), while doing less work with them than almost anywhere else, so I'll admit to being biased, but it really is a region where the rule of law is, depending on the context, highly personalized or outsourced to religious authorities, and presented without any of the procedural due processes you're used to.
That's the double edge sword of such a relaxed visa regime. Such open borders work well when either you have a classical liberal free market* with little social services (1800s America) or leaders who rule with an iron fist that can kick out undesirables the moment theyre inconvenient(Dubai).
Thus Singapore, Dubai, 1900s Hong Kong, 1800s America are some of the most famous examples. Free market with no social services doesn't really exist much anymore so most the remaining examples of open borders are something approximating dictatorship, except maybe Argentina(in practice they have almost no enforcement of immigration).
Yes. I was stationed there for work for 2 years by my employer, overall a good experience. Before going my overall view of Dubai was pretty negative, now I would say it’s slightly positive.
