I'm a UI Developer and my 16yr old brother is job shadowing me this week. The current project I'm working on uses backbone.js and I fear he will be lost if I try to explain it to him. He's had one semester of Java so far and knows HTML / CSS fairly well.<p>I'm open to any suggestions on how I should fill my day with him.
i recall doing a couple of days of work experience at a similar age, perhaps a bit younger, where i was parked in front of an old linux machine and left to learn/play with some interpreted language i'd never seen before.<p>given i was only there for two days, this wasnt going to turn into some ongoing work, i think giving me some hands-on and engaging thing to do - despite it being totally independent to the project they were working on - was probably a good idea. from memory i found it pretty interesting.
Is it possible to include him on some sort of design / architecture meeting with your team? That might give him enough to think about and learn from while keeping him engaged.
When I was a teen, I visited my older sister at work one day. I ended up doing stuff like stuffing envelopes for her. After I left, the department hired some assistants to do more of that kind of thing for people in her position so they weren't doing so much admin type tasks.<p>When I had a corporate job, I did an hour of job shadowing here and there for specific purposes. When in another department, I just watched as they did typical work so I could better understand what they did in a department that supported ours. In my own department, there was more explaining because I was shadowing someone faster and better than me with the express purpose of improving my speed and general process.<p>At age 14, I was introduced to computers by a friend of my sister's. My sister was in college and I was visiting her. The friend was surprised at how much I was able to grasp given that I had no computer background (this was in the dark ages, when I had a yellow rotary phone and pet dinosaur).<p>So I think:
A) Just letting him watch is perfectly fine.
B) If he asks questions or has a specific purpose, you can tailor it some at that time.