"My wife is Japanese and we were living in New Zealand at the time," he said.

"So we made the decision to come back to Japan, though we stayed in New Zealand a bit longer than we intended."

Since McDonald was unable to transfer to Japan with Telecom, as they had no offices in the country, he specifically went to Japan to interview for several different positions, and one of them was with Symantec Japan.

"It was one of the companies that I was introduced to while I was here, although they were all similar companies into network design and security, which was what I had been doing," he said.

"Symantec may have been just one of them, but it turned out to be the one I would end up working at."