Teenagers & Computers
Scoble: “BBC: Teenagers say they want to work with computers for the "excitement and the money.”
I guess I qualify as an authoritative source on this topic. The kids at school have an annoying habit of figuring that the stuff I do is all fun, easy, and simple. I think they get this impression from watching me do things. No doubt, I can fix the average printer issue in a flash (if you're getting streaks in your inkjet print, try cleaning the printhead), or make Word stop overwriting when you insert text (press [Ins] to toggle overtype mode) with ease.
There are a lot of things that are great and exciting. One example is seeing an application I spent weeks perfecting go live and work perfectly. Making software work for kids is not the easiest thing to do. No doubt, this is exciting. Similiarly, seeing weeks of not so exciting work payoff is exciting. The benefits are often great too. Getting things done in half the time after a lot of not so exciting work is great. Leaving a bit earlier every day as a result is definetely exciting.
On the other hand, I cannot, however, make many things happen as easily as replacing an ink cartridge. Most of the non-helpdesk type tasks in my one-man-band operation actually require some serious thinking before trying them (and if I screw up, it's rarely exciting to fix). Getting the higher-ups (downtown) to do thinks like give me a delegation for DNS so I can throw out an ancient NT4 domain and goto 2000 AD. Dealing with bureaucracy is not exciting. Spending a beautiful weekend in a server room restoring a crashed box is definetely not exciting. In fact, it really sucks
If you're a teenaged person looking to do IT, go for it! Just don't think the whole enchilada is as exciting as it might seem. There are some caveats.