US pays for designers to stay home

By MICHAEL FOREMAN

Earning a United States-sized salary while still enjoying a rural kiwi lifestyle to the full might sound like an impossible dream.

But this apparent contradiction is exactly what two computer graphics programmers, Andy Bearsley and Matt Fox-Wilson, have achieved with their software contracting company, Ambient Design.

Ambient's clients, including large software companies such as Corel and Adobe, are all based in the US, but Mr Bearsley and Mr Fox-Wilson, his partner, live and work in a house set in a 10-acre lifestyle block in the Waitakere Ranges.

Mr Bearsley says they don't work for New Zealand companies mainly because these don't pay enough.

"A base salary in the US for a programmer is $US50,000 ($125,000) - and that is a pretty basic starting figure. Here, $60,000 for a senior software engineer is considered high."

With six major projects on the go worth $1.2 million over the next year, Mr Bearsley and Mr Fox-Wilson are each earning between $US100,000 and $US120,000 a year.

"They are paying us what is a low salary for them, but it is high compared to salaries here," says Mr Fox-Wilson. "Everybody's happy, and for us it is so much better than working nine to five."

Mr Bearsley agrees. "I'll get up, feed the dogs, read my emails and then I might be ready to start at 11 am. I'll work through to midnight, but that's interspersed with breaks. Whenever I get a mental block I'll take the dogs for a walk in the forest."

Mr Fox-Wilson describes Ambient as "more of a collective than a company" that passes on many of the benefits of overseas earnings combined with low overheads to its employees.

"It's not just remuneration," he says. "People are going to work best when they are relaxed and happy, and the boss is not breathing down their neck."

This relaxed attitude is helped by the fact that Ambient's three employees work from home - one is based near Rotorua.

"We are fairly distributed," Mr Fox-Wilson says. "It doesn't matter where an employee works as long as they come in once a week and they can get access to our server for source code."

Mr Bearsley and Mr Fox-Wilson began working for US companies after leaving Auckland-based Right Hemisphere, where they wrote 4D Paint, a precursor to that company's successful Deep Paint graphics rendering package.

By that time the pair had established a close working relationship - Mr Bearsley writes complex 3D graphics routines while Mr Fox-Wilson specialises in user interfaces.

They approached a US company called MetaCreations, well known for its ground-breaking graphics effects package Kai's Power Tools, and asked for a job via email.

"MetaCreations was ideally aligned to what we wanted to be doing. That is they were taking cutting-edge technology and putting an understandable user interface on it," says Mr Fox-Wilson. But MetaCreations was not impressed at first.

"They saw the .nz email address and didn't bother to reply. When we rang them up later they said, 'But we don't have an office in New Zealand'," says Mr Bearsley.

MetaCreations finally agreed to meet the pair at Siggraph, an important computer graphics industry conference held in the US, where Right Hemisphere was demonstrating Deep Paint for the first time.

"An engineer came over to the booth, looked at Deep Paint, muttered something and then went away and brought a higher-up engineer. That process was repeated twice until we suddenly had John Wolsack, the president of the company, breathing down our necks. He absolutely wowed us and offered us a job a few days later."

Unfortunately, after two happy years at MetaCreations in Santa Barbara, the pair were made redundant when the company shed more than 25 per cent of its staff and they soon found themselves back in New Zealand.

Undaunted, they decided to contract for US graphics companies from New Zealand, but getting the first deal signed proved difficult.

"We nearly went broke," Mr Bearsley remembers. "US companies take a long time between first approach and signing on the bottom line, and our first client almost crippled us. They kept us hanging on for three or four months. It got to the point where I said, 'If we don't get a contract tomorrow I'll have to ring up IBM and go and work for them here'."

However, that vital contract arrived in the nick of time.

While Mr Bearsley is determined that Ambient will grow at a cautious rate, he reckons that there is plenty of work available in the US, and that most US clients are not put off by Ambient's location.