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Comment by tcdent | Hacker News Reader

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.

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I 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.

A 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.

Great 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.

I 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).

See, 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")

> 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.

That's the point, their innocence is lost too early.

Clearly we'd better raise them in child jail to preserve our illusions.

Are you serious? Seeing and hearing everything doesn't mean understanding everything.

"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)

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