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As a publicly educated kid who started working when he was 15-1/2 (the legal minimum age in CA for a work permit at the time), I'd encourage you to rethink the
by tcdent 11y ago
As a publicly educated kid who started working when he was 15-1/2 (the legal minimum age in CA for a work permit at the time), I'd encourage you to rethink the importance of child-like innocence.
Not that I regret my choices, but that 13 is just a little too young to be career-oriented, and 16 is probably the bare minimum. I was into computers at that age, but if my decisions were based on profitability or professional viability they would have been very different.
Don't underestimate the role of a crappy jobs and bad bosses, either. Hard to say you'd want anyone to experience that intentionally, but a wide perspective is priceless and can't be taught by explanation alone.
- pjmorris 11y agoGreat perspective. I didn't start work until I was 16, and the dishwashing jobs (with both good and bad bosses) I had really set me up to appreciate what a great gig programming can be.
- PakG1 11y agoA hundred times this. I don't think perspective can be taught by explanation alone. You know else comes with perspective? Often humility, empathy, and emotional stability.
- bpp 11y agoI once had a "lifeguarding" job that was 20% making sure people didn't drown, 60% janitorial work and pool equipment maintenance with toxic chemicals, and 20% listening to snotty members of the country club say incredibly tone-deaf things. I cried more than once. The life lessons were invaluable.
- go2college 11y agoI agree completely. The summer in college I spent working on an assembly line screwing the same four screws in for 8 hours a day for $8/hour taught me nothing about building software. However, it gave me a great perspective then and now on how lucky I am to get paid (well) to do something I actually love doing (write software).
- notahacker 11y agoSee, I did do web design work when I was 13 (and for a lot closer to $6 than $60 per hour), back in the days when "web designer" was a cool job and teenagers wanting to experiment with websites got a book on HTML rather than tweaking WordPress templates. The key part was that I was offered the work because I'd started to experiment entirely of my own accord. In the grand scheme of things, I don't think it made a huge difference to my life choices either (you can learn a lot about crappy jobs and bad bosses in a couple of weeks' "work experience")
- eli_gottlieb 11y ago> As a publicly educated kid who started working when he was 15-1/2 (the legal minimum age in CA for a work permit at the time), I'd encourage you to rethink the importance of child-like innocence. Only adults think that any such thing as child-like innocence actually exists. Children see and hear everything.
- HemanHeartYou 11y agoThat's the point, their innocence is lost too early.
- oldmanjay 11y agoClearly we'd better raise them in child jail to preserve our illusions.
- donutz 11y agoAre you serious? Seeing and hearing everything doesn't mean understanding everything.
- rogersmith 11y ago"Don't underestimate the role of a crappy jobs and bad bosses" This a 1000 times. As someone who's done his fair share of shit jobs before working in the relative comfort of the "tech industry", this was a valuable lesson in what is the reality of any work relationship (that is: "I work x hours and you give me x monies", that's really all there is to it...). Lots of tech companies wouldnt get away with their "We're all a big family so you have to do unpaid overtime because we're all a family" bullshit if their employees went through dishwashing or other menial jobs before. (Simplifying a lot for emphasis, but you get my drift)