Working from home has a dress code, even if nobody writes it down. Smart enough on top for the camera, whatever you like below it. Nobody sees your shoes on a video call.
The current role ended that. More senior, customer-facing, and suddenly the job meant being in actual rooms: speaking sessions, demos, customer meetings across the GCC. Nearly three years on, that hasn't changed.
Left to myself I'd live in shorts and flip-flops. The office version isn't far off. Plain T-shirt and jeans, with the same black trainers every day. It's a uniform, and I like not having to think about it.
Customer days are different. Smart casual where the room allows it: a shirt, smart trousers or good jeans, proper shoes, and usually a blazer. A suit where it doesn't, and always for talks and roundtables. Every region I've worked in has expected it, and the Gulf more than most. Turn up underdressed and you spend the opening of the meeting earning back what a blazer would have bought you for free. I've never tested that. I've never walked into a customer meeting underdressed, and I don't intend to find out.
Meanwhile the most-watched people in tech give keynotes in T-shirts, and the internet takes it as proof that clothes don't matter. I read it differently. They've earned the right to set the dress code. In a customer's meeting room, the customer sets it.
So I dress for the room I'm walking into, and save the shorts for Fridays.