The Industry and a 14-year-old
I’m not usually one to complain about this sort of thing, but I feel that it has to be done.
Web and software development and design are very special niches in today’s society. Until a few years ago, teenagers couldn’t expect jobs more respectable than flipping burgers at McDonalds or some other unskilled labor. This changed when computers and the internet became widely available to teens and opportunities for both learning new skills and becoming publicly known became available. Now they could teach themselves techniques that traditionally would be only be expected of college graduates. They could also get their names out and get hired for freelance positions or sell designs/apps as-a-product online.
This would seem great, now teens can work a skilled job, right? Well unfortunately, no. I’m fourteen and make about $65/hr working freelance as a front- and back-end web developer—when I can get a job. One of two things happen. The first is that school gets in the way and I’m unable to work on projects for a month or two at a time. This not only forces me to take short-term hiatuses, but also prevents me from taking on higher-paying, more involved long term projects for fear that school will intervene and I’ll have to leave the project prematurely. This is unavoidable, but it gets me excited for the opportunity to accept a longer-term project or work as an intern at a local web development agency during the summer.
The real problem that is certainly avoidable is the misconception of these agencies that the industry still requires a college education, even for an intern. While I think that a college education is beneficial, in this niche, real life experience is a thousand times more useful than formal education.
I was disappointed by a search for local internships, that resulted in only two openings, both in Baltimore—almost an hour away, which is a long commute when you consider that I could take a higher salary working from home as a freelancer. But much worse than the commute is the qualification. Tho no. 1 item on the qualifications list for the first opening was “Senior status in college”. The second wasn’t much better, it’s first requirement was “Junior or senior status in college”.
WTF! I mean, being a CS or software development major is nice, but I would be willing to bet that I have more relevant experience than a great majority of that group. Why is age (that’s essentially what it is) even a requirement for something like this. In my opinion, the qualifications should be based purely on actual knowledge or experience, not an artificial measurement that has a positive correlation with experience, to say the most.
I don’t want to sound like I’m villainizing the people responsible for making that a requirement, I assume that they made the decision because in traditional industries, a high school student isn’t qualified to accept the position. As I explained above, this is not true for computer-based industries, so requiring qualifications of that sort only shows that you do not understand the industry or are behind the times.
Internships aren’t the only opportunities denied to me and my peers, Google’s Summer of Code, for example, is only available to college students. I would expect better of google, but google’s internships for any computer-related field have the following as the number one requirement:
Currently pursuing a BS, MS or PhD in computer science or a related technical field.
Gah.
So that’s my rant. I don’t expect that the situation will change significantly before I am a senior in college, but I hope that it can change before it has the opportunity to impact my children’s opportunities.