MHS graduate and Meta designer Ryan Germick returned recently to speak to Mr. Niksich’s computer science students about his career path. 

Ryan talked all about how he got into the field of technology, his career opportunities, and the reality of what it’s like getting into the technological field. 

Although he was planning to become an art student, Ryan’s career goals shifted toward an interest in the internet once receiving his first camera. 

“A bunch of people in my family pulled together, because we didn’t have any money, and got me a primitive digital camera,” he said. “This was before cellphones were around. This was so primitive that the digital camera took floppy disks which was a surreal deal.”

With this camera, he was able to create a website centered around being a photo journal.

“It was like my first taste of the internet,” he said. “You know, I was able to express myself, and it was basically free for everybody to use it.”

Ryan loved the reception he received from his website which became the spark that ignited his passion.

“At first, it was my friends and family, but then it was like a big viral smash,” he said. “I would get emails from people who I had never met. They’d be like ‘Oh, thank you for taking a picture of that. My brother was there and he didn’t get a picture, and he’d always talk about how cool it was.’ I was like ‘Wow, this is a really amazing way to connect with people.’”

While finishing school, Ryan made a website based off of his art illustrations, expecting people to hire him to make more, however, the attention on his website was diverted elsewhere.

“People would see my illustration portfolio website and be like ‘Cool illustrations, can you make me a website?’ They didn’t care about my drawings,” he said.

After seeing this, Ryan began working on websites for his friends.

“They’d pay me like $200 to make their website, and I’d get paid like ten cents an hour,” he said. “I had no idea what I was doing, but I was like ‘Cool, I get paid to learn’. So, I put myself in college, making websites for people.”

After graduating college, doing freelance work, and moving around a bunch, Ryan crashed in San Francisco with his brother and decided to apply for Google, where he worked for 19 years.

“Google is a wild place, man. Like, the second day was Halloween, and there was a life-sized pirate ship. They had a Halloween party and went all out. It was like my glory days. I used to see the founder playing volleyball outside of my office,” he said.

After over a decade of leading Google’s Google Doodle team and working with Google’s AI Assistant, Ryan’s work and experimentation with AI earned him an interview with Mark Zuckerberg for Meta, where he was hired and currently works as a product designer.

“Now I’m building all kinds of embodied bots. Embodied, meaning like it has bots with more of a presence like faces, names, and voices.”

Ryan encourages that anyone can make a business.

“It’s an amazing time to build,” he said. “I mean, all of you guys can be starting companies right now. We could’ve spent this entire hour you wasted talking to me making an app together that you could turn into a business.”