NCS Australia tech innovator challenges outdated views on neurodiversity

For neurodiverse people, like NCS Australia emerging tech specialist Sowmiya Selvakumaraswamy, there still needs to be a level of comfort before they discuss their neurodiversity.

She has been in her current role at the multinational IT company since January 2023.

“I don’t think society is fully there yet when it comes to understanding and accepting neurodivergence in all its forms,” said Selvakumaraswamy. “That’s why I usually wait until I’ve proven myself, until people see that I’m reliable, capable, and smart, before I tell them I have ADHD.”

“I don’t always announce it upfront. People might assume I’m being secretive, but honestly, it’s more about protecting myself. In most cases, people kind of already sense something.”

For example, when Selvakumaraswamy told her manager she had ADHD, he just laughed and said, “Girl, that’s not a surprise”. However, he was surprised to discover she was also on the autism spectrum.

“That reaction says a lot,” she noted. “It’s because autism is still viewed through a narrow lens, mostly shaped around the classic idea that autistic people are unsocial, don’t smile, or don’t connect emotionally.

“When someone like me, who is social and expressive, says they’re autistic, it challenges those outdated assumptions.”

For Selvakumaraswamy, these stereotypes matter, and that’s why she doesn’t walk into a room and introduce herself by saying, “I’m neurodivergent”. This isn’t because she is ashamed of her ADHD, as she is vocal about her neurodiversity on social media platforms like LinkedIn.

“In person, I’m more cautious,” she said. “It’s because the way society portrays ADHD and autism often frames us as less capable.

“People might offer help from a kind place, but the underlying message can sometimes hurt. Things like, ‘Are you able to handle this?’, even if well-meaning, can chip away at your confidence.”

That’s why Selvakumaraswamy is careful and only opens up when she feels safe.

“Interestingly, being in tech, I find myself naturally drawn to others who are neurodivergent too,” she said. “It’s like we recognise each other. I wait, and if they start to slowly open up, I do too.

“It’s a quiet, unspoken, but powerful, ‘Are you ok?’. [This] can carry a lot more meaning than it seems.”

Starting in tech

In her almost ten-year journey in the IT field, Selvakumaraswamy said there have been times when she doubted herself and let the opinions of others affect her.

“People would get in my head, and I’d wonder if maybe tech wasn’t for me,” she said. “But no matter what, I kept getting drawn back to it.

“I’m so glad I listened to that small voice inside me that said, ‘keep going’. Now, here I am still exploring, still learning, and still just as excited about tech as I was when I wrote my first line of HTML.”

Technology made sense to Selvakumaraswamy in a way school never did because it felt exciting, but also “incredibly logical”.

“I’ve always liked design, too. I love design just as much as I love tech,” she explained. “But design often feels subjective. It’s like society decides what’s considered ‘good’ or ‘worthy’ design, and that can be frustrating.

“Tech is binary… the program runs, or it doesn’t. That kind of clarity made it easier for me to navigate and feel confident in what I was doing.”

Selvakumaraswamy’s ability to connect with the programs in technology goes back to her formative years in high school.

“I think my first real encounter with tech was sometime around ninth or tenth grade,” she explained. “It started with basic HTML… I know some developers would cringe at calling it programming, but that’s what it was introduced to me as…honestly, it felt like magic.”

When Selvakumaraswamy wrote the first line of code and saw an image appear on the screen, there was an “instant spark”. The action of typing something and seeing it come to life was so simple and direct, and it made her think about how it was something she wanted to “do for the rest of her life”.

“It might surprise people, but I struggled a lot in school [and] I wasn’t the student anyone would expect to go into tech,” she said. “People often see tech as this field for geniuses…the top-of-the-class kind of student.

“I was barely getting by [and] when I told people I wanted to pursue tech, it didn’t fit the picture they had of me.”

Finding her way through technology

For Selvakumaraswamy, her discovery of technology was at the time an “experiment”.

“I was always trying to find ‘the one’ path that felt right,” she explained. “After school, I went into telecommunication engineering, thinking it was a step into tech.

“But it turned out to be so theoretical, and I started struggling again. I remember feeling so confused [about] struggling.”

It wasn’t until the very end of the course, when there was an explanation and a look at the applications side of things, that it “clicked”.

“The problem is, I’m not someone who can just learn something because I’m told to,” she said. “I need to know why I’m doing it; and if I understand the purpose behind it, I’ll go above and beyond…I’ll run a whole marathon to learn it.

“But if there’s no ‘why’, it just doesn’t stick, no matter how hard I try.”

She still remembers a moment during her final semester in the course when a telecoms engineer gave a talk about their work. She was able to understand that this is what she should have been doing all along, but by then, it felt too late.

“My GPA [grade point average] had already dropped, finals were around the corner, and I couldn’t turn things around fast enough,” She explained. “I didn’t land a good job right after because of my grades, but I kept learning on the side.

“Eventually, I got a web development job [and] to be honest, I wasn’t fully into it at first.”

This was the moment she realised she’d been living by society’s definition of the “right way”, and it simply wasn’t working.

“I failed…I figured, what do I have to lose? I might as well do what I want to do,” recounted Selvakumaraswamy. “That’s when I did something a bit wild [and] signed up for ten online courses at Udacity, all at once.”

The online platform focused on technology career paths and was free back then. At that point in Selvakumaraswamy’s career, she was aware that she might’ve had ADHD, and told herself to try all the courses until she found one that stuck with her.

“The one that clicked for me was a course on virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR),” she said. “I had no idea what it was, I’d never even used the tech before, but it just lit me up.

“It had the perfect mix of design and technology; it was visual, hands-on, and not theoretical. It felt new and playful, like there were no rules yet. It became my playground to explore and create.”

She taught herself VR/AR and then landed a job at a startup in India as a VR/AR developer. The experience allowed her to work on all kinds of things.

“There was this innovation stream, where you were encouraged to experiment, build, and try new ideas,” she said. “That’s when I realised Innovation, trying out different things, solving problems creatively…that’s what gives me joy.”

Eventually, Selvakumaraswamy went on to do her master’s in design, innovation, and technology at RMIT in Australia. At the time, it was rare to find a course that focused purely on innovation.

“The whole idea was, they give you a problem, and you use everything you’ve learned [in] tech, design, life experience, to come up with a solution,” she said.  “No rigid rules… and that was perfect for me, after graduating, it was still tough.

At the time, 2021, no one hired ‘innovation’ people and job descriptions would say ‘innovation’ but still expect five years of experience in one specific technology, noted Selvakumaraswamy.

“That wasn’t me…I had a bit of everything,” she said. “Luckily, I found this small emerging tech team at a small company, Arq Group, in 2022.

“A friend who worked there referred me. It was a tiny team, just three people, and the person leading it got what I was about. He was innovation-focused, too, and we clicked.

Selvakumaraswamy worked at Arq Group as an associate consultant for a year, before moving on to her current role, after the company was acquired by NCS in 2022.