When the Tech Guy is 13 (or even 10) | Hacker News Reader

When the Tech Guy is 13 (or even 10)

boss.blogs.nytimes.com

51 pointsJ3L240457 comments

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...

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...

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.]

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.

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.

Or perhaps you could take to writing a few of these a day? A website such as the one demonstrated in the article isn't much of a task for anyone with a modicum of experience.

I would expand on that and say that it's best to avoid markets where the customer cannot easily tell the difference between expensive work and cheap work in general. If you're the high-end provider in a space where the average customer wouldn't know high-end from low-end from a hole in the ground, you're in for a bumpy ride.

Innovation -- on a scale untouchable by cheaper, younger, hungrier competitors -- is one way to differentiate. Another is to find a niche that cares about (and will pay for) the best of the best. But those niches shrink every year as the Great Unwashed move up the learning curve.

Why would you avoid a market a 10 year old can easily be successful? Web development is a pretty big market to say the least. There's many small businesses who need a wordpress install with a few pages, and others need a their own CMS that integrates with special API's, the market is huge. I was salaried and wrote maintainable code that's still used today at 17, and generalizing an entire market isn't very constructive.

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.

Nah, those comments and the layout are put together by a WYSIWYG editor. I agree though, it's good to see kids get started into experimenting with a business early in life. It's also nice to see them do something more lucrative than a lemonade stand.

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.

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.

Ok, so the kids are not programming but they are getting started with both development and business at a very young age and that's great. Getting even just a few years of a lead over the other kids their age really helps in the long run.

Keep in mind that in Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell (http://goo.gl/VC2FC) it shows that just getting a head start makes a huge difference.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Here in Ireland we have what is called Transition Year which is in the 4th year of secondary school. This year is a lot freer in terms of the curriculum and is mostly spent by the students doing work experiences, internships and going abroad. Most parents here denounce it and call it crazy that kids aren't doing "structured" work for a year but I think it's brilliant, I certainly got an awful lot out of mine. Not exactly what you are suggesting but similar idea.

The idea of home schooling is great, that you can avoid the somewhat crazy regimented rote learning education system we still have but it's important to realize that socializing (and learning social skills) is a big part of school, a big part I think home schooled kids miss out on.

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.

I agree on the design critique, but the interesting point is that the business owner was pleased with the result. A professional developer/designer may scoff and think "I would do better than that," but in reality the boys delivered exactly what the customer wanted. That's real competition.

plus everybody in his town will check out his website and perhaps buy something... win-win situation.

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.

They could at least not stretch the images.

The question is, is it really worth 2000 dollars? Hell is it even worth the 700?

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.

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.

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?

In this story the "client" didn't even expect to hear anything back from the kids. Apparently there was no contract. This is a client setting a very low bar with very low expectations. Also, some clients are happy with even the ugliest results because they don't know any better themselves.

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.

I remember reading an article during the Dot-Com era about hiring kids, and one company would pay in video games (and similar) because giving him cash was illegal.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Someone once told me that when people use 'cutting edge technology' as technology they almost always mean 'technology after they have been born' And yes the term 'digital native' is probably as unclear/flaky as that. =)

But I'm not being ageist here or anything of that sort. The fact is that when we are young, we start from a clean slate. The youth of the current generation is probably growing up with the internet and some might say facebook as one of their primary means of connecting with their social network. And that is all they know. They have no concept of life before the internet or even facebook (or google).

Whereas for the older generation, we grew up not being able to just google for information. We grew up without having facebook to monitor our social networks. Yes we use facebook and google now, but our perceptions are also colored by the good ol' pre-google and pre-facebook days. There are some of us that understand the appeal of facebook and take to it like fish to water. And there are some of us that do not understand what the fuss is about.

For the younger generation, almost all of them take to facebook like fish to water. That is all they know. They have no concept of life before facebook or google. Can you imagine what this does to their world view? I don't think I can and I am excited to see what comes out of their perspectives.

> 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.

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.

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.

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

Awwwww

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" ?

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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 ;)

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

hehe, Comic Sans...

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