Companies Should Be Open to Hiring Teenagers In Creative Jobs
Teenagers can legally be hired once they reach a certain age, like 15 in the EU and 14 in India. But hardly any companies hire them for creative jobs like programming, graphic design or accounting. In this blog post, I’m not talking about not mechanical jobs like serving ice-cream, sweeping the floor or delivering pizza, which have limited potential for career advancement, a high pay or fulfilment.
Why aren’t companies open to hiring teenagers for creative jobs? It’s not as if companies that wait for students to complete their education are getting qualified professionals at the end of it. India’s education system is broken, with even PhDs working as sweepers. Companies know this, and provide their own training to new hires, which takes as much as 3 months. In that case, why not be open to skipping college?
Teenagers can also be hired for less money, because they’re not used to earning money and happy to be paid. Since most companies don’t hire them, teenagers you make an offer to will have few other options and less bargaining power. Students who spend four years getting a college degree naturally demand to be compensated for this investment, both in college fees and opportunity cost (the money they could have earned in that time if they were working), increasing the cost to hire them.
The education system may work better in developed countries, but it’s still no substitute for real work. Ambitious students want to get ahead in their career, for which sitting in a classroom is not the best way. Or maybe they want to be paid to learn than paying to learn. Or they may want to work for a few years and then go back to college. Or they want to continue with formal education, but for only a few hours a day, with the majority of their time going into working. Or they may want to try a job for a while to see if they like it before committing to four years of education in that field. Since one needs to keep learning throughout one’s life in order to stay relevant in today’s world, finishing one’s education before entering the workforce is no longer the only option.
There are also more prosaic reasons like needing income to support themselves and their families, say if their dad left them. Or some students feel that they can’t just continue with formal education, that it’s not for them any more, perhaps because their teachers are useless (my experience, too) or they’re stuck in the wrong line, like studying maths when they’re really passionate about programming (again, my experience).
Whatever the reasons, there are tons of teengers who want a job. Companies, and society as a whole, need to accommodate what people want, not demand that people contort themselves to fit a bureaucratic, one-size-fits-all system. Human beings are not iron ore to be dumped on a conveyor belt and molded into any shape desired by society.
Sure, there are legal restrictions: teenagers can’t do hazardous work like mining, but I’m anyway talking of office work like programming. Teenagers can work for only 5 hours a day, with a one-hour break in between. They can’t be made to work overtime or after 7PM. But, despite these restrictions, you can still get good work out of them: if you’re a manager, would you prefer to get 30 hours of work done a week, or none? Of course, companies should treat teenagers with extra care, keeping in mind where they’re in life, not lie to them or mistreat them.
It should be common for teenagers, once they reach 14, to take up a job, for the maximum 6 hours a day allowed. Not that everyone should, but that lots should. There should be different paths for people to follow, not just one.
Companies can also help teenage employees develop skills that will or may be required by the company. Let’s say a teenager joins a company to work as an iOS developer. They can start him off with just implementing UIs given by the designer, and teach him the minimum. Give him a few months to learn the basics of iOS development and working practices of the team and how to function as a well-performing member of the team at the extremely limited task he does. Once he’s achieved that milestone, the manager might ask him to work on something else like network syncing. After a while, he could work on something that may affect the entire app, like a caching layer. After he’s done iOS development for years and has become a competent iOS developer, he may move on to backend development, say implementing an API needed by his iOS app.
In this way, people can start from zero and become well-rounded professionals, learning on the job, one step at a time so it’s never overwhelming. This needs to be actively planned by the manager, with a plan made on day one and regular meetings afterward to track progress and make adjustments, unlike adult employees, who’re often left to learn and grow by themselves (which shouldn’t happen, but does).
The manager could also plan ahead and encourage the employee to learn what he’ll work on next. If our iOS engineer would need to work on the backend next, and it’s written in Nodejs, the manager could suggest that the employee build a simple Nodejs service in his personal time. This wouldn’t be committed to the company repository or deliver anything the company needs, so it would fall outside the 6 hour a day limit. The manager would underscore that the purpose is to help the employee learn, that this is not part of the job, it’s purely optional and the employee won’t be penalised for refusing it, or for saying he’ll do it but then not doing it, or for taking longer than expected to learn it.
This kind of off-hours learning opportunity will also substitute for formal courses in a college, but with better ROI, where every day spent learning gives an employable skill that can produce concrete results for the company. Or for oneself, if one chooses to do a side project or start a startup later. As opposed to esoteric stuff like Turing machines or LR parsing, which most people don’t actually use in their jobs.
Learning on the job is a better way of learning than a classroom. You learn the practical aspects of the job like using prioritising, refactoring, how to debug an unknown codebase, how to estimate time, and many more things. You learn version control when you actually use it to coordinate as part of a team, doing real work that people care about, not when you do an academic project, making some commits just for the heck of it. On a job, you learn to perform as part of a team, doing code reviews, coordination and communication, how to disagree constructively, and tons more things. You also use today’s tools, not yesterday’s tools, which colleges often teach, even top-tier ones like IITs. In my case, IIT Bombay taught me CVS in 2005–07, when SVN was already popular. If you were starting a real project, you’d have used SVN, so why teach CVS?
Companies would need to make other changes to their working practices. They can’t treat teenagers like they do regular employees and expect it to work out. Teenagers would require more guidance. They should be assigned work rather than “figure it out”. And assigned tasks in order of priority, like “Do A, then B, then C”, rather than expecting them to prioritise or multitask. They would primarily coordinate with their manager rather than with multiple people. Their manager may need to coordinate with them a couple of times a day rather than a couple of times a week. They’d have to be hired based on their intelligence and aptitude, not based on their current skills or resume, which they don’t have. Teenagers need more structure: maybe they’d have fixed working hours, no flexitime or work from home, but no “you have to meet the deadline, working longer hours if needed”, either. They come in at 9AM and leave at 3PM, say. If a teenager is fired, the company should explain to the other teenagers why, in detail, using it as a learning opportunity, so that they don’t make the same mistakes. After all, teenagers don’t have the experience in life to learn this any other way, and need to be told.
In summary, full-time formal education is not an option for all teenagers, for many varied reasons. Society should accommodate them, by offering jobs in creative fields like programming or accounting, not just mechanical jobs like pizza delivery. Companies should rework their business practices for teenagers. Done right, this could be a great benefit to both teenage employees and to companies.
