Every morning Thomas Rix wanders out the door of his apartment in New York City’s East Village, grabs one of the many rideshare bikes littered around the area and heads a few miles down the road to work at Twitter’s New York headquarters.
Becoming a senior software engineer for one of the world’s internet giants didn’t involve an Ivy league education. The 24-year-old was born and raised in Masterton, and doesn’t have a university degree. He never even graduated from Wairarapa College.
“When I was 14 I started programming, 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.”
With support from his parents he kept at it, and while his school grades remained average his IT skills soared. He left school before the end of Year 13 and had a very brief stay at Victoria University – one semester’s worth – before dropping out and heading for a local startup.
It soon failed but, with good luck and talent, he quickly landed a job at the now-defunct CV Bank. There he learned valuable skills and, in early 2010 decided it was time to take a leap and head to one of the most thriving IT hubs in the world: California.
For Thomas Rix, becoming a senior software engineer for internet giant Twitter didn’t involve an Ivy league degree. Photo: Unknown
He didn’t have a job lined up. "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,” he recalls.
But Thomas got a shot with online real estate company Trulia and he delivered. He stayed with them for a year before heading out for a brief stint with online retailer Zappos and then on to his current employers, social media giant Twitter.
If someone can get such a desirable job at such a high-profile company without a university degree, is such a degree even necessary?
After a successful stint at the company's San Francisco office he headed cross country to its more recent New York base late last year. It didn’t take him long to settle in.
“I love New York,” Thomas says. “It’s one of those places you dream about as a kid and, even now, it’s sometimes hard to believe I actually live here.”
His success raises an interesting question. If someone can get such a desirable job at such a high-profile company without a university degree, is such a degree even necessary?
Rix is certainly not the only IT professional without a degree. Josh Comrie, the Managing Director of high profile New Zealand IT recruiters Potentia, reckons out of New Zealand’s 62,000 technologists about half hold a tertiary qualification.
“A lot of variables come into play,” Comrie says. “I certainly can’t say it’s 60 per cent necessary or anything like that.
“There are two paths in technology. First is the business route, which has job titles like business analyst, project manager, applications support, consultant. The other route is the technical route, which involves people like server engineers, software developers and test engineers.
“That [technical] route tends to require someone who either has an innate passion or interest in what they’re doing. Those people just have a high degree of fascination in technology, so for them the need to go to university may be less.”
“I’ve known guys like Thomas who went to the end of high school, looked at uni and thought ‘I already know most of these things – why would I waste four years of my life and $25,000 to be taught something that I know and get really frustrated doing so?’ There’s always work out there for those people.”
Another of “those people” is Amber Craig, a young technologist who works at Westpac and blogs for The Wireless on technology matters. Craig had an upbringing steeped in IT – her dad worked in the industry and she learned the ropes working in his office during school holidays – and, for her, a degree simply turned out to be unnecessary.
“For me it was more around coordination, picking things up quickly and just wanting to learn. Those to me were the key skills, plus then picking up things on top of that,” she says.
“It sounds really corny but you need to have a thirst for learning. Always wanting to learn and listen to people is quite key.
“When I was younger I did think about university a lot, but in the end because I was working in IT already I found that once you were in a place it was easier to apply for roles within the company. Then you could then move into different departments and do different things.”
When I was younger, a lot of jobs required a university degree or six-plus years in the field, which was a little bit hard if you only had one or two … but sometimes I went for it anyway to just give it a try.
It was a pretty seamless transition. Still, when starting out the lack of a degree did, at times, pose problems.
“It can be hard when you start off because some jobs require a certain level of experience,” Amber says.
“When I was younger, a lot of jobs required a university degree or six-plus years in the field, which was a little bit hard if you only had one or two … but sometimes I went for it anyway to just give it a try.”
Both Amber and Thomas embody the sort of passionate, highly capable technologists that Josh Comrie refers to. Whether you need a degree or not in IT depends on the sort of person you are; if you love the work, are totally driven and are also, well, brilliant, then maybe you don’t. For everyone else – and that’s most people – then it’s probably a good idea.
The chief executive of the Institute of IT Professionals New Zealand, Paul Matthews, probably puts it best. “There’s still plenty of work out there for those who don’t have a degree,” he says, “but realistically they probably either need a degree or experience. It’s a bit hard now to walk into a role with neither.”
Degree or otherwise, there is a significant shortage of IT professionals in New Zealand. Josh Comrie puts the figure somewhere around 10,000, a significant number in what is a relatively small industry. It is, on some levels, hard to understand; according to Trade Me, four of the five top paying jobs in New Zealand are in IT, and it has one of the highest average salaries in the country.
There are a variety of reasons as to why more people aren’t flocking to the field. New Zealand has a large expatriate community and many of them, like Thomas, are involved in IT. Closer to home, some people in the industry criticize a very “white, straight, male” culture, which deters women from the industry.
By and large it seems to come down to several interlinked aspects; a lack of understanding of the industry fuelled by outdated stereotypes and a lack of “soft” skills, such as lateral-thiking, among IT workers, all underpinned by failings at the secondary school level.
It’s the problems at school that most industry insiders bring up when talking about shortcomings in the industry. In Thomas’s case, nothing he learned at school came in use later on.
“In the curriculum it was computer studies, not computer science,” he says. “It was how to use computers for clerical work; it certainly wasn’t suitable training for an IT job. Nothing that I learned in computer studies when I was at high school has helped me.”
It’s a sentiment echoed by many. IT is usually taught alongside hands-on subjects like metalwork and woodwork instead of as the science it really is.
“We do quite a bit of work in schools,” Matthews says, “and when we ask kids what IT means we often get a response along the lines of maybe something to do with their mobile phone, or working in a dark room in a basement or an attic somewhere. It’s very antisocial idea.
“When they learn that it’s actually very broad opinions change, because when they start out there’s really quite a negative perception. Technology at schools is often put in with metalwork, food tech and so on … so, on one hand there’s a negative perception of working in the industry stemming from a lack of understanding as to what IT’s all about, combined with it being treated as a less academic subject that those that perhaps aren’t as academically inclined will take.
“It’s not hard to see how it could start to impact on the numbers and the types of people who are moving into the field.”
One person who has particular first-hand knowledge in this area is Rohan Wakefield, co-founder of the Enspiral Dev Academy. Advertised as “an apprenticeship on steroids,” the academy is a Kiwi adaptation of Californian IT boot camps that train up potential IT workers in nine grueling weeks.
If we’re going to do one thing we (the IT industry) need to tell a different story. We need to talk about not just mavericks, not the Mark Zuckerbergs and the Rod Drurys necessarily, but about the companies and what actually goes on there.
“Going into schools and asking about IT produces all the stereotypes – the guy who plugs in your printer and shows you how it works and so on,” he says.
“So you talk about Facebook – something that everybody’s familiar with - and say ‘who made that?’ And people are like ‘well, you know, some geeky people’. So I say how about we look at them, let’s look at the types of people that make these things and what they can do and how they work.
“After about 15 minutes half the people I talk to say ‘we had no idea about the diversity, the fun, the nature of the work that’s involved at being in IT’.
“If we’re going to do one thing we (the IT industry) need to tell a different story. We need to talk about not just mavericks, not the Mark Zuckerbergs and the Rod Drurys necessarily, but about the companies and what actually goes on there.”
There have been recent changes in the school system to help rectify IT’s outdated image and to bring it more in line with real world IT roles. Matthews notes that achievement standards have been created for more advanced and relevant topics like software, networking and digital design; for its part, the Ministry of Education acknowledges that the teaching of IT in schools was probably not at the level it could have been and has instituted industry-guided changes to help fix various problems.
“We recognised that ICT industries are important contributors to the New Zealand economy, and that opportunities for students to learn about digital technologies and be credentialed for this learning had not been made sufficiently available within senior secondary schooling,” writes Ministry of Education Deputy Secretary Student Achievement Rowena Phair.
“The development of new digital technology assessment standards was in direct response to ongoing education sector feedback, and their desire for a range of digital technology standards to be made available to students in senior secondary courses. They also wanted students to be presented with an opportunity to be credentialed at NCEA Levels 1-3 with endorsement in digital technology courses and have access to an endorsed NCEA certificate.
“Digital technology is now a part of a compulsory Learning Area which schools are required to offer to all students in years 1-10, and may offer as an optional course of study in senior secondary school at years 11-13.”
Between 2006 and 2010 the number of IT graduates at universities dropped by 45 per cent across the whole country. There are several reasons behind the drop, including the current economic climate and the amount of time it takes to become qualified.
Changes at school may help, as will upcoming programs like the Enspiral Dev Academy which focus heavily on soft skills and understanding IT culture. It’s a constant work in progress but one that, industry insiders suggest is pointing in the right direction.
This is all by the by for Rix, of course. Done with school and settled into a premium job with a prestigious company, he’s reaping the benefits of being young and working in a major internet company. “I'm working in a big office, everyone’s super friendly, I get three meals a day cooked by elite chefs … it’s fantastic,” he says.