sghi

Yeah, you're right. I mean, anyone who can follow basic instructions is part of the field, just like a 15 years old editing a WordPress config file is a Computer Engineer, right?

In all seriousness, there is a big difference between doing lab work, which can absolutely be done by high schoolers, and skilled, technical work in the biological / chemical fields. As pa5tabear said, there just aren't as many jobs out there for the skilled biologists or chemists, which is one reason you can usually see people with degrees doing jobs which they are "overqualified" for.

You can use a VPN from the UK and it works well - there are others around, but I use hola on Chrome and Firefox and it works pretty well, for free - http://hola.org/

I agree that he probably did, and in an ideal world I think it would be better if he was a bit older and had a little more knowledge of the whole subject area. But where do you draw the line? If he memorizes some information, and that leads to him being the 'computer expert' amongst friends and family, and he ends up in an IT career that he really enjoys because of it, is that a bad thing?

My first experiences were looking up basic problems online, then memorizing them enough so that if the problem happened again I could fix it. Eventually I wanted to dig more into the actual problem, and just like that I was hooked!

So yeah, it might be a problem but hopefully it'll lead to something productive and if the kid actually enjoys it I can't see the harm.

For a 'hard to fill' role 20-30% first year salary isn't unheard of at all

I have to agree... took me until the Bee to realize...

The first two were almost believable!

Completely agree that there are people out there that are just in it for the sales side of things and to fill roles as quick as possible. It can be hard to find ones that are good and take pride in what they do, and it is a problem for the industry.

This is from a UK Tech Recruiters point of view working from an agency perspective on Developer and Infrastructure recruitment.

We recruiters sometimes get a bad rep for not looking at CVs without certain words or phrases on them, and candidates can get frustrated when because they don't have a very specific skill-set then they're overlooked, even if they know (and WE know) that they'd be able to pick it up in a very short time period. Its not always our fault - with some of the companies I've personally worked with unless they have everything in their CV listed on a job specification sent from a lead developer then they won't be passed through to them to review the CV, even if they have a lot of other skills that we think could mesh in well with the development team and company culture.

Yes, there are recruiters that don't know what they're talking about but not all of us are like that! One of the downsides to what we do is that a small minority of recruiters manage to get most of us a bad name, which is a shame.