

When the Tech Guy is 13 (or even 10) - J3L2404
http://boss.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/03/when-the-tech-guy-is-12-or-even-10/?src=twr

======
nadam
I think it is great that children are building things, although I don't think
it is news to anyone here, I think everyone here have built things as a child.

The other moral of the story for me is that I should avoid markets where a 10
year old can easily be successful. I mean if the client cannot make a
difference between your work and the work of a 10 year old, then you may not
be in the good market. Here in Hungary 'small scale web development' (website
creation for small firms) is in the hands of young guys (although not 10 year
olds, more like 20) working for very low amount of money. I avoid that market
like plague. Also I don't want to be 'the IT guy' for a small non-tech firm,
which is very similar.

"He dashed off a check for $2,000" My god, how incredibly happy a 20 year old
average PHP developer in Hungary would be for having $2,000 for the mentioned
site...

~~~
notahacker
You could probably get a half-decent local-US-based small web firm to do
something quite slick-looking for $2k, (throwing a basic CMS and 12 months'
hosting into the bargain). Getting £2k from an unfussy client for a site that
can be put together in a day is a sweet spot for many people.

As it is, it kind of reminds me of a slightly cruder version of the sites I
was building in my early teens for £4 per hour back at the beginning of the
last decade. I'm amazed they turned down all the extra cash...

~~~
jambo
Not sure which you meant, but they're both low. $2000!=£2000

My experience is that fussiness is inversely proportionate to price
sensitivity. Now if a prospect tries to dicker over hundreds or tell me they
"have a nephew who does this kind of stuff," I end the conversation as quickly
as possible.

[edit: I say this as someone who, in the early days of the web, was one of
those kids making websites by hand or with pagemill for $2000 a pop. I don't
begrudge anyone doing this today.]

~~~
notahacker
For a $2000 flat site with minimal graphic work and minimal iteration of the
end product you'd probably be looking at an hourly rate of $250 plus, which
unless you're investing huge amounts of time into acquiring these customers is
good whatever currency you're mistakenly converting into using the wrong
ratio...

I agree about customers that try to use the boss' nephew as a bargaining chip
generally being the ones that also expect the website to rapidly delivered and
perfect, but there's plenty of money to be made from small businesses that
don't need or want anything complicated.

~~~
jambo
I meant that you were mixing currencies, and 2000 quid is a lot more than 2000
bucks. I agree on the rate being high if you can do it in a day, but my
personal experience is that clients like that are hard to find. Long-term
clients who need one-off sites are different because there's established trust
and empowerment to make decisions.

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cmalpeli
Frankly I think this is a wonderful story and am surprise by the jaded tone of
the comments. Sure, the site might not be perfect, but at least they comment
their source code well: view-source:<http://www.wrightstownusedauto.com/> and
use tableless layouts! If the owner is happy with the product, then so be it.
We should all be happy these kids are taking an interest in something tangible
rather than wasting away their time playing Halo.

~~~
ck2
They used DreamWeaver.

If typing, highlighting and selecting options to modify the text from a menu
is considered "programming" then many grandmothers are also programmers when
they write emails and change text fonts/colors.

~~~
dc2k08
I'm not sure this is entirely fair. If they have a half-understanding of what
is happening in the background of dreamweaver but are using it as a short-cut
and a tool to learn how websites work, then it's a little different from
granny pressing the bold button in an email.

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wizard_2
I started as one of those kids (now I'm twice their age) and it why I'm a good
consultant. I got experience and made mistakes when I had the time and freedom
to. I got to try things I probably wouldn't today. (Mostly because I didn't
know better. I wish I had found a mentor who knew about consulting at that
point.) So I'm pro these kids exploring making things for money.

I'm bothered by the article though. It's written as if these kids are just as
good as a "professional" and gives me the impression that the author thinks
the only difference between someone doing this for years and a kid who went to
computer camp is a degree of professionalism and responsibility.

~~~
jonnathanson
For the most part, I think most journalists look at the surface layer of a
front-end and their thinking/appraisal begins and ends there. They think all
back-ends, solution stacks, layers, etc. are interchangeable "guts," and that
the front-end is where all the difference is made.

As much as we would probably groan at that worldview, we need to keep in mind
that for many of the mom 'n pop businesses out there, that often _is_ the
case. Those are the sorts of businesses that might as well pay an enterprising
13-year-old $700 to develop a turnkey solution they don't have to worry about
from a financial or operational standpoint.

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danio
Maybe the web designer of <http://www.nissenbaums.com/> would be interested in
the re-use of their images.

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ck2
OMFG the _NY Times_ linked to a website that uses BLINK.

I am now having horrible 1990's flashbacks.

(and he paid $700, willing to pay $2k for that)

I am 100% for encouraging and teaching kids to build websites, but how about
actually teaching them ie. show them how to make external stylesheets, give
credit when copying stylesheets verbatim, etc.

ps. I believe they used DreamWeaver, so is that considered "programming" ?

~~~
varjag
For most people, anything to do with computers beyond making a Word document
is "programming".

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jcromartie
You have to give kids more credit. Maybe if we stopped locking them up in
compulsory age-based schools all day long and let them do more of what they
enjoyed, we'd see how capable they can be when given real experiences at an
early age.

I've actually felt, when sitting in a cube farm building CRUD software, that a
10-year-old could do my job.

~~~
inovica
I have a 3 year old and a 7 year old and I've been seriously struggling with
this recently. I have put the eldest into a private school, which is great and
he has come on tremendously, but I still am left with wondering if the classic
way of educating ultimately isn't great for him. I have read about home
schooling etc, but I just don't have the time to do this. I myself have never
worked for a traditional company since I left university (I'm 40 years old
now) and so have worked from home, had offices and generally a much more
'loose' working environment than most people so I'm more flexible. Just wish
there was something else I could do - I need to look for something else for
them to get life experience. Thanks for your comment - it's just sparked me
thinking about it again

~~~
trafficlight
I think some kind of part time apprenticeship-style program would be
fantastic. I wish that I could have spent some meaningful time as a kid
learning about different professions and skills. I believe that those
experiences in turn would make the traditional school learning even better
because it would enable kids to apply their new found knowledge in real world
settings.

~~~
jcromartie
Apprenticeships are definitely a good way to learn. In _Deschooling Society_ ,
Ivan Illich talks about the need for learning that is built-in to the world.

He's very practical, and suggests that people get lifetime education credits
from the government that would pay for employers that offer apprenticeships
and learning in their workplaces.

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sgt
The site is awful looking. However, it's designed by a couple of 10 and 13
year olds. That makes the site pretty good in my eyes.

~~~
limmeau
It looks like what I'd expect the website of a small mom&pop car repair to
look like. If they had a pretty layout with a beautiful Ajax appointment-
scheduler and an automatic twitterbot for questions and what have you, I'd
suspect they a) write hefty bills to afford all that web design or b) are
member of a chain.

~~~
hnal943
They could at least not stretch the images.

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koski
sigh...

I feel bad for the people who have to go to work and their bosses think now
that even a ten year old kid can do their work. Sounds a bit like a Dilbert
story coming up.

I know some children can play piano concerts by age of 6 but it does not mean
everyone can.

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a_m_kelly
I did something similar the summer I also got my first on-the-books job. My
mom had met a local business owner at a party and she's recommend my "skills"
as a "web designer," I put together a slick looking splash page with the
company logo and a stock photo of camera lenses. He hired me and I set to work
building an embarrassingly bad site in (oh god I'm sorry.) Dreamweaver. He
didn't really have content or any clue about what he wanted the website to do
and being an idiot 16 year old, I couldn't help him. I was making ten dollars
an hour in cash in 2004, which was great when my other job was paying me 7.50
to push shopping carts. I built him a new computer with parts from newegg that
managed to get screwed up inside of 6 months. "I agree you _do_ need a lot of
RAM if you're using photoshop!" I had a lot of fun spending the guy's money on
hardware but he got very little out of the deal. A quick Google reveals he
still doesn't have a website but has a presence on a number of local-listing
type sites. Likely doesn't really need one.

It was a valuable lesson in figuring out that you should make sure everyone
knows what to expect going into a job and has clear ideas what they hope to
get out of it.

------
kylebragger
Honest question: is it legal (at least in the US) to hire kids that young? Are
they able to legally enter into contracts at that age? How about as interns?
What could some of the possible repercussions be?

~~~
nickbarnwell
As someone who was in this exact situation themselves, having started a tiny
IT firm at thirteen, the answers are:

    
    
        >Is it legal (at least in the US) to hire kids that young?
    

No, it's not, at least from from the perspective of most states. However, as
long as you're not going to make them do manual labour and they are doing it
as contracting, it is likely that no one is going to care.

    
    
         >Are they able to legally enter into contracts at that age?
    

I did have each one of my clients sign a boilerplate contract about data loss,
hardware damage, acts of god etc... but fortunately never had to test if it
was binding for either party.

    
    
        >How about as interns?
    

The laws regarding interns are very well defined, and very strict. You are
almost always better off hiring some schmuck for $7.25 or whatever minimum
wage is than trying to figure out if someone qualifies as an intern and
preventing them from doing any work that actually benefits the company, as
that's illegal without compensation. If you do hire someone as an intern, have
them do work that would typically be done by a full-time employee, and don't
pay them or grant them college credits and someone tells the Labour Board my
understanding is that it's a civil case with very large fines associated, but
YMMV by state.

------
alexwestholm
I started coding professionally at 15 (by that I mean a real job making real
money for a real, now publicly held, company). I certainly agree that "kids"
have value, but I think there's a concern that rarely gets addressed in these
articles: professionalism.

I left that company after one month because I found myself utterly unprepared,
at 15, to be living cube life. Later on (18), I helped a former boss bootstrap
a business around a monitoring package we'd written. He was having
difficulties with the business model, was stressed out, and not always the
most pleasant person to work for. After an incident on site at a client, I
emailed him saying I wouldn't be showing up again. While the situation might
have been tense for anyone, this was certainly not the appropriate way of
resolving it.

Teenagers are often too reactionary to conduct themselves professionally. This
is also difficult to assess in a hiring interview, so realize that hiring
young is a gamble.

------
flapjack
As a teenager who does web work, it always bothers me when people judge
something by the age of its creator, rather than its quality.

------
JimboOmega
Is it legal? Was my first question. Around where I lived you had to be at
least 16 (maybe 14?) and there were restrictions on hours and the like (so you
had enough time for school).

But then hiring a kid to mow your lawn was never anything anybody got riled up
about, so I don't see why this would, either. Around that age I fixed the
computer of some family friends and they gave me one of theirs that they said
was broken and wouldn't boot... turned out everything save the motherboard and
power supply were good to go... cheapest upgrade I ever got. (From my point of
view, anyway).

Back in the 90's in high school stories abounded about this sort of thing - so
and so got 100 bucks an hour for a day of work, etc. That's absolutely the
exception, though, regardless of how smart you are.

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zazi
Quality of website aside, this just highlights to me the great divide between
the youth of today (digital natives) and the 'older' generation (non-digital
natives).

The owner of the Auto shop should have been able to do up a similar website if
he had bothered to look around the web for solutions (wordpress, blogger etc).
But I guess he wasn't comfortable enough with the internet to do so.

Whereas the digital natives fearlessly jumped into the fray and started
hacking up a website with little knowledge of the intricacies involved.

This gives me great hope for the next generation. Computers in the hands of an
entire generation that is not afraid to harness its power (or to muck around
with it). I can't wait to see what these digital natives are capable of when
they grow up.

~~~
ojbyrne
Much of the technology of the internet dates to the late sixties. Assuming
that there aren't "digital natives" from the "older" generation is ageist. In
fact you could assume that many people in their 40s, 50s and 60s are more
"native" than youth, because they've been living with technology for longer.

~~~
hnal943
Digital natives are people that can see the benefits in spite of the
architecture, not because of it. They see the world as iphones and gmail, not
the TCP/IP stack. They assume functionality that is mind blowing to non-
natives. It's not ageist to point out that younger people expect more
functionality from technology.

~~~
ojbyrne
Forget "ageist," this seems idiotic. "mind blowing?" People who have been
living with technology for decades have seen many "mind blowing" innovations,
and they understand that "iphones and gmail" are probably going to be just as
ephemeral as innumerable technologies of the past.

~~~
hnal943
So, your point is that baby boomers on the whole are more comfortable with
emerging technology than younger generations? That's absurd on its face.

~~~
ojbyrne
My point is that "digital natives" are a subset of the general population that
cuts across generations. Perhaps the proportions are different, but I'd still
bet that the baby boomers have a larger absolute number, even if the
proportion is greater for younger generations.

Are Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, or Bill Gates not "digital natives?" You'd have
a hard time arguing that.

In general, making an argument based on generations is, by definition, ageist.
An easy test is just to, instead of saying "baby boomers" or "Gen X" try the
same assertion with "black" or "jewish." If, after the substitution, the
assertion sounds racist, chances are it was ageist before the substitution.

------
russell_h
> They are way ahead of the rest of us on much of this stuff, having cut their
> teeth on it at home and at school.

Maybe this was just me, but I can't imagine the school aspect being further
from the truth.

In the schools I attended the closest I came to learning how to make a website
was when, in a science class, we were given step by step instructions on how
to make a graph in excel. "Click File then select <button>. Next click on
<button>". You get the idea. If the graph didn't look identical to the
teachers we had to do it over again. They were trying to teach us how to do
very specific tasks on a very specific set of software, and were failing even
at that.

And that I was constantly berated for my failure to fill out the worksheets
that they called "homework", because I was busy teaching myself OpenGL,
doesn't make me any happier about schools getting any sort of credit for my
abilities.

------
bithub
That's the same kind of work I used to do when I was about 15, creating
websites including some PHP. Retrospectively I have to say, that I lacked alot
of experience and guidance. So I pity the guy who has to maintain my spaghetti
code today.

------
corin_

      Website designed and maintained by
      Rossie's & Scottie's Website Development Company
    

Awwwww

------
kevinelliott
While it's really cute and kids are quite capable, you are taking chances in
the legal realm by hiring them. In many areas, children require work permits,
and sometimes the minimum age is 15. Otherwise, it's often illegal if you
don't go into contract with their parents first. It all depends on where you
are in the world.

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markbao
In my limited experience, I feel like it's pretty common--many
technology/business-related people say they see a little bit of a younger
version of themselves in me.

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Mahh
When I was younger, tinkering on the computer on my own was fun for awhile,
but contributing in a way that I felt I was affecting others made it even more
fun.

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toadi
It was already mentioned : " is it legal?"

But maybe I can go to China open a sweatshop of 10 year old kids developing
websites.

If Nike can do it ;)

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xentronium
Now I know who designed sites in web1.0 era. Kids :)

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dotnetnoob
It seem like we're training people on how to use tool such as MSFT Frontpage
but not actually know how to program. Just my two cents.

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headShrinker
Would someone please teach the children to optimize images...

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beilabs
hehe, Comic Sans...

