Quest leads to tweet life in US

MADE IT: Masterton's Thomas Rix is living the dream as a software engineer in New York for Twitter.

THE dirty, bustling streets of New York City are 14,000 kilometres and a sizeable cultural shift away from the rolling Wairarapa countryside Thomas Rix used to call home. How he ended up there, strolling to work as a high flying, senior software engineer at internet giant Twitter, is symbolic of both New Zealand's infamous "brain drain" and proof that the elusive American Dream really can come true.

Working at Twitter is, for 23-year-old Rix, the result of a remarkably rapid rise through the ranks of the American IT-industry, a hard scrabble, thriving environment that attracts the best computer-minded people from around the world. When he first arrived in San Francisco three and a half years ago, Rix was a 20-year-old from the New Zealand countryside who not only hadn't completed university, but hadn't finished high school either. "The stars just aligned," he says, with an air of understatement.

Rix was born and raised outside of the decidedly low-tech town of Masterton, just about as far from New York in distance and character as is possible. From a young age the small town environment confined and stifled him. "Where I grew up was three miles north of Masterton itself, and when I was growing up I couldn't drive and it wasn't feasible to walk anywhere," he recalls. "So not only did I grow up in small town, but I grew up on the outskirts. I always wanted to be in a big city."

He began honing his computing skills while marooned at home in the countryside. His gift with computers - encouraged, he hastens to add, by his supportive parents - became apparent as a teenager; taking the initiative, he soon found he could make a bit of extra money freelancing and helping out with projects online. "I started to programme when I was 14 or so, and when I was around 15 I began freelancing online," he says. "I'd get home from school at 4pm, work until two or three in the morning then go to sleep and go to school the next day." Needless to say, while his programming expertise rose his school grades fell, leaving plenty of exasperated teachers along the way. "I was a C student and proud of it," he says, tongue firmly in cheek.

Never really fitting in at school, he left halfway through his final year after gaining enough NCEA credits for University Entrance. Straight away he packed up and headed south to Wellington, finally breaking into the big city environment he'd aimed for since a child. As it happened, he barely used his University Entrance qualification when he got there; a brief stint at Victoria University yielded a B in Accounting and a C in Management - similar to his high school grades - before dropping out to work at a local internet startup. As they often do, the startup went bust within a few months, but he soon found work at another one, the now-defunct CV Bank (later jobs.co.nz). University was now out of the picture; he'd found his calling.

Rix's breakout came through family. With a California-born mother, he'd held American citizenship since birth; soon, with even a major city like Wellington becoming too confining, he decided to make the most of it. Quickly packing all his belongings into a single, small bag, he made a run for the centre of the IT universe, a place he'd never been before; San Francisco.

"When I moved here I didn't have a job lined up," he says. "The only person I knew was a client I'd freelanced for, and for the first three nights in the city I slept on their couch."

His lack of local knowledge led to some amusing episodes early on. "I looked on [US Trade Me equivalent] Craigslist and ended up living in [San Francisco suburb] the Castro, not knowing ahead of time that it was the gay district," he says with amusement. "It was certainly different from Masterton."

He quickly found his feet and, through hard work and good luck, found a job with online real estate company Trulia.

"Getting your foot in the door in this industry, getting that first job, can be extremely difficult," he says. "By the time I moved to the US I already had about three years of experience under my belt, but I was fortunate that Trulia took a gamble when I said I was good at this stuff. And, you know, I wasn't terrible."

Unlike many professions, lacking a qualification isn't necessarily a drawback in IT.

"Some of the big players in this industry - Google, IBM, Oracle - they really care that you have a computer science degree from Stanford or something similar. But many of the companies that move a bit faster care much more about what you can actually do, rather than where you came from."

After just over a year with Trulia he briefly moved to Zappos, a large online retailer owned by Amazon, then on to the big time with Twitter. It wasn't, he admits, the first time he'd come into contact with the social media giant; a couple of years earlier, when he first arrived in California, he'd had a job interview there. It didn't go well.

"I blew it," Rix admits. "But a year-and-a-half ago, when I was out looking for a job, I figured I'd touch base with the recruiter I worked with way back when. I ended up with several offers on the table and, in the end, Twitter asked me to come in and hear their offer."

Initially he turned them down, preferring to head to a smaller Bay Area outfit but Twitter pursued him vigorously. Unsurprisingly, after a well-constructed charm offensive he gave in. After taking up Twitter's offer - he won't say how much his salary is, although the average for a similar position is around US$130,000 ($156,000) - he settled in as a software engineer. The lifestyle appealed immediately. "[Working at Twitter is] pretty ridiculous," he says. "Everyone is super friendly. I'm working in a big office, there's a Twitter running group which goes running all the time, there's a cycling group with customised spandex cycling gear ... the perks on site are phenomenal; three meals a day cooked by elite chefs with an insane amount of food options."

A couple of months ago, after three years in San Francisco, Rix moved to New York City. He's still with Twitter - he was even promoted to senior software engineer - and is settling into the local culture, going for walks across the Brooklyn Bridge and runs around lower Manhattan. All in all, not bad for a high school dropout from Masterton.

"I do miss New Zealand - it's a beautiful country - but I just felt stifled by the size of projects available there," he says.

"The services you make are for such a small audience that it's hard to get exposure to truly big systems. Twitter just announced it has 200 million active users, and as you can imagine the data generated from that is insane - over 500 million Tweets per day - and when you're dealing with things on that scale you get challenges that you wouldn't see anywhere else.

"I love New Zealand, but I wouldn't want to be anywhere else."

And who could blame him?