Ask HN: Who is hiring high schoolers?

4 points by chaosagent 9 years ago | 6 comments

Most companies don't really consider hiring high schoolers as interns, making it hard for us to get real world experience in a company at this age. Who is?

saluki 9 years ago |

Pick out some local companies you would be interested in working as an intern at? Stop by see if you can get a tour, make connections, inquire if they have an internship program.

Most fun/tech companies love helping kids. We coach a lego robotics team and have gotten lots of tours, demos and even a meeting space for our team at a local startup.

All by calling, stopping by, following up and asking politely.

An internship would be a little different, but if you get to know people at a company it makes it much easier.

whichdan 9 years ago | |

As an extension of that, make sure you figure out your pitch!

- What have you learned on your own?

- What excites / interests you?

- What do you hope to learn?

- Why is [company] the right fit for you?

- What does success look like at the end of your internship?

- How much time can you commit to an internship?

- What sort of compensation, if any, do you need?

chaosagent 9 years ago | | |

Thanks! (to you and GP) I've been putting off actually calling companies for a while now; I'll definitely try it soon.

tropo 9 years ago |

It's not just about school. Age 18 is a magic number in our law. Without that, a contract with you is pretty sketchy. Being under 18 also limits your hours, work environment, job duties, and so on.

Businesses that typically employ under-18 people are prepared to deal with all that. Other places don't want the bother and the risk, even if there wouldn't actually be any trouble.

rman666 9 years ago |

What are your skillz? Please tell us you are already have some programming chops :-)

chaosagent 9 years ago | |

I'm currently pretty familiar with webapp backend development with Python, Flask, and a bunch of its plugins (SQLA, WTF, Jinja, etc) and Python in general. I'm also exploring Rust and am beginning to feel comfortable in it. I have experience with all sorts of miscellaneous stuff, but these two are the ones I'm most involved in at the moment.

I'm currently working on a CMS-ish style scheduling platform for CTF competitions, an ptrace-based application sandbox in Rust, an online judge system (like a programming assignment grader), and an IRC server in Rust with Tokio and futures.

I have a good amount of experience with cybersecurity and algorithms and data structures too despite a lack of formal education in them ;)

Website (just some links): http://chaosagent.io CV: http://chaosagent.io/resume.pdf