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.
