start your own company!
Ask HN: Internships for a 13-year-old?
41–50 of 85 posts
Re: Ask HN: Internships for a 13-year-old?
#42Once you get to college, you're going to realize that you'll never have a vacation like you did when you were young. Real life starts and it never ends until you die. Spend your summer doing something that you love. If that's coding, do that, and don't worry about getting paid for it yet. Also don't worry about building your resume -- you can start doing that when you're 14, if your heart is really set on it. No one…
If you work hard and achieve succss early in life, you can take long vacations for the ret of your life.
The real issue is that some people have a postiive attitude adn enjoy what they do, and some people live their life regretting everything they didn't do and not appreciating what they do.
Re: Ask HN: Internships for a 13-year-old?
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's easy to romanticize "carefree childhood", but I think that's baloney. I've loved working with computers for literally as long as I can remember. When I was 13, working with computers was playing! Getting paid to play would have been a dream come true for me at that age.
I've loved it, too, but I don't look back and treasure my countless hours coding. It's great to have a skill, but the things I remember are time I spent with my family and friends.
Would you go back in time and do things differently? I personally wouldn't, I would do things the same way again; I was crazy motivated when I was younger.
Re: Ask HN: Internships for a 13-year-old?
#44Why do you want to do an internship? If it is because you like programming, I don't think anyone is going to hire you for a few years. Why don't you do a few projects on your own and see what you can come up with? If it is because you're turning prematurely preprofessional, for god's sake enjoy your childhood. Go to a pond and skip stones on the water.
Indeed, the best thing to do is to spend your time engaging in activities that someone else things is fun, instead of what you enjoy.
Re: Ask HN: Internships for a 13-year-old?
#45Maybe not the most popular opinion here, or maybe it will be, but advice from a father of two boys: Enjoy your childhood for the remaining 3-5 years before worrying so much about your professional career. You have decades of working in software ahead of you, if you continue on that path. Just enjoy your childhood, go out and play, or even just work on projects you enjoy. Once your childhood is gone, you'll regret not…
It's easy to romanticize "carefree childhood", but I think that's baloney. I've loved working with computers for literally as long as I can remember. When I was 13, working with computers was playing! Getting paid to play would have been a dream come true for me at that age.
That's basically it in a nutshell. I don't think it even occurred to me when I was a kid that people "worked" with computers. I loved programming games and exercises from books and magazines. That was the pinnacle of fun for me. I think my mind would have been blown if you told me back then that I could have a job doing what I do today.
Re: Ask HN: Internships for a 13-year-old?
#46Why do you want to do an internship? If it is because you like programming, I don't think anyone is going to hire you for a few years. Why don't you do a few projects on your own and see what you can come up with? If it is because you're turning prematurely preprofessional, for god's sake enjoy your childhood. Go to a pond and skip stones on the water.
Indeed, the best thing to do is to spend your time engaging in activities that someone else things is fun, instead of what you enjoy.
I already included in my answer the option that he genuinely enjoys programming, in which case he should self-start projects.
You'd be surprised, however, at the amount of kids who go "professional" from a very early age because of parental pressure or something like that. All I said was that if that is the case, it is too early to go professional.
Re: Ask HN: Internships for a 13-year-old?
#47Lachlan, make sure you're open to job opportunities that aren't initially in software. When I was 13, a doctor (and close friend of the family) hired me to organize sign-in documents for new patients at his office. While there was no mention of software at the beginning, you better bet that by the end of the summer, I had finished a tool that let patients sign in electronically and invalidated the need for my initial…
Just wanted to second what Andrew is saying here.
In my experience, the most valuable knowledge in software (unless you're in the elite crew of coders) is domain knowledge - the ability to bridge the "functional" or "business" needs with the software that can automate/improve/innovate in that space.
You can be a mediocre coder and bring incredible value to a team by knowing the domain very well.
You only get this kind of knowledge by studying or living it.
Re: Ask HN: Internships for a 13-year-old?
#48I'm 16, and I was in your position as well, also at age 13. I think I might be able to give you some perspective.
At 12, I started working on an open-source Ruby gem in a not-so-niche market (would rather not say, might give it away). I (American) had an offer from overseas (Britain) to work on a very small project in Ruby using the gem I created. I got paid about $200 I think, over PayPal. That made me want to start working.
Someone reached out to me right after my 13th birthday, saying they wanted to hire me to work on a Rails application, and their idea seemed good. I got nervous when the guy (whose LinkedIn seemed legit) sent over an NDA, but I figured, how much trouble can a 13-year-old really get in? I didn't even tell my parents. I was basically getting paid to work on my gem, which I would have been doing already - no big deal. After about 2 months, I think the guy caught on to my age or lack of experience, because he told me I had finished what needed to be finished. All in all, I made $3500 for about 60 hours of work.
I continued working on my gem for free after that, and other companies reached out for internships, etc. I turned all but one down, because school had started in the fall, and that turned out to be only two months or so of an unpaid internship. I dabbled in other side projects after that - I was bored of working on the same project for what was now a little over a year.
Imagine my surprise when I come back just 6 months after that, and there are two forks of my gem on GitHub and it's been downloaded 30,000+ times (not even counting the other two forks). And yet, the work offers had dried up. I didn't have a website, no recruiters had my contact information, and I was a little lost on what to do. I volunteered that summer, telling myself that more opportunities would arise.
I haven't worked on that project in months. I'm not sure if I'm burnt out from programming (haven't done much of that recently either), but I'm definitely burnt out from that project. I logged onto RubyGems recently and between the original gem and all the forks of it, it's been downloaded 100k+ times. If I created a blog, and started updating the original gem again, I'm sure I could find some work. But I'm not interested in doing that, and I'm not sure why.
I'm headed off to college in the fall internationally, with less work experience than I would've liked and less money in my pocket, too. I'm not sure what the lesson from my story is, but hopefully it will make you take the "too fast, too soon" ideas to heart. Don't stop coding - if it's what you love. But don't let high school pass you by either (just read that you're actually in middle school). My best memories aren't receiving my checks in the mail or making a résumé or even coding, but the time I spent with my friends.
To answer your question directly, no - I was never successful in finding advertised internships for young people. It was discouraging. I'm probably lucky that guy who paid me for months didn't confront me about my age - I'm not sure what would've happened.
Re: Ask HN: Internships for a 13-year-old?
#49I would ask you why you're looking for an internship.
If it's for the cash, as people have mentioned, you're going to have a tough time due to legal issues.
If you're just interested in getting more experience, I would try to find a mentor who could recommend potentially interesting projects to work on. There are a bunch of interesting computing technologies that are becoming more and more accessible to use (e.g. image recognition, NLP, machine learning, augmented/virtual reality, etc), and I think there are a lot more exciting things to do than work on yet another webapp.
Personally I spent ages 14+ learning how to hack websites and web browsers, and I found that to be a lot of fun, but there are piles of other things to get excited about. If you want some cash, companies will pay bug bounties to people as young as 13 for finding security vulnerabilities in their websites (see: HackerOne etc).
Re: Ask HN: Internships for a 13-year-old?
#50Getting an internship at 13 can be difficult, but not impossible. Here's my advice from my experience coming to NYC for an internship while in HS:
- Try your hardest, and don't let anyone tell you you can't.
- Figure out if there are any employment laws that could affect you working somewhere.
- Don't tell people how old you are, until it's absolutely necessary (legally), let them judge you on your skillset and portfolio
- Ignore their requirements. Apply and ask for the position anyways!