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Comment by xiphias2 | Hacker News Reader

I wish there would be exceptions to child labor regulations, but just the opposite kind: I could already do programming at 8 quite well, but I started professionally only after I was 23 because of all the rules. I wish I supported my family more by doing knowledge work.

Now the work introduced here has nothing to do with knowledge work, and it just takes away time from building a carreer, so of course I’m against that kind of child labor.

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I'm not sure what was stopping you from working until 23, but in the US people can generally start working full-time at 16. I certainly know people who dropped out of high school after 10th grade in order to start working as mechanics.

"The U.S. Department of Labor's Wage and Hour Division (WHD) administers and enforces the federal child labor laws. Generally speaking, the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) sets the minimum age for employment (14 years for non-agricultural jobs), restricts the hours youth under the age of 16 may work, and prohibits youth under the age of 18 from being employed in hazardous occupations."

https://www.dol.gov/general/topic/hiring/workersunder18

I was born and raised in eastern europe before having access to internet. US is much more business oriented thinking by default than eastern-europe (where education comes first), although young people nowdays have global access to a lot more information.

What does this have to do with not being able to work as a programmer earlier than 23?

I'm not from the US but I started working part-time as a developer at 16, and full-time at 17. This was 10+ years ago, but I know more teenagers now doing something similar than there were when I was growing up (for non-typical teenage jobs).

It's very unlikely you could write software at a professional level at age 8. I wrote my first video game at age 10 using Basic (a clone of Space Invaders), so did many of my friends. That doesn't mean we could find a job as software developers at that age. Sure, there are progidies in all forms of art and science, but again thinking you could write software professionally as a kid is very different than actually doing it as there are many skills and personality traits you develop as you grow up that are critical to successfully develop software, or to execute any task really that requires organization, time management, decision making, negotiation, prioritize tasks, etc.

I was helping my father in the late 80s to write an accounting software for his own accounting firm. Of course I didn't know accounting, but I could write some basic stuff (in QBASIC) to help with the UI, and he installed it at some places where he was working at professionally. It was a time before you could buy accounting software in eastern europe, so everybody was writing their own.

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