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11-Year-Old Becomes Network Admin for Alabama School
alphadogg points out a story about 11-year-old Jon Penn, who took over control of a 60-computer school network in Alabama after the old administrator suddenly left. Penn provides technical support, selects software, and teaches his classmates about computers. From NetworkWorld:
"The first thing Jon found as he leapt into the role of network manager was that he had to map out the network to find out what was on it. He bought some tools for this at CompUSA and realized there was an ungodly amount of computer viruses and spam, so he pressed the school to invest in filtering and antivirus protection. 'These computers are so old they don't support all antivirus programs,' Penn says. The school took advantage of a Microsoft effort called Fresh Start that offers free software upgrades for schools with donated computers, switching from Windows 98 to Windows 2000."
No, he says he's too mature.
They always play on the 'boy genius' BS. He's just a normal kid making inexperienced mistakes along the way.
BTW, couldn't he have just downloaded some free Windows or Linux based A/V rather than buying crap at CompUSA?
... was 12. He was ready for a career change after so long in IT.
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
Good for him, though comments like "technical people must have 'integrity and character,' and should use their skills for beneficial, not malicious purposes" and "It's his job to fight the bad guys" make his parents sound a bit loony.
That if you give kids responsibility early on, they'll step up. My last crop of interns at work were college juniors, and couldn't be trusted to make copies, much less administer anything.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Translation: his mother works at the school, and his dad's a civil engineer, no surprise that they'd have something to do with this. Child prodigy stories always gloss over the part you'd really want to know about, like how anyone in the administration figured it would be ok to have a minor sign contracts. Obviously he's not really the admin, his mom is, and he's just doing the work or something like that. An 11-year old isn't legal to work, there are these pesky child labor laws in this country (duh).
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Or the computers are donated and ancient, and can't run XP or Vista...
If any of our clients ever see this article, they're going to start hiring 11-year-olds and pay in comic books.
There are only 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't.
This headline had my interest until I read the summary. If the kid is so damned smart, why wasn't he using any of the many free online/ported tools instead of buying off the shelf crap at CompUSA? A move from Win98 to Win2k? Get real! There is nothing to see here except that the school is using child labor, and perhaps that the child is MORE qualified than the person they paid before him. That last part comes as no surprise, but it also doesn't say much.
Moving on.
>.....or MS is really taking the whole Vista damage limitation thing seriously.
If they made the schools get vista, they couldn't really install it on machines designed to run Win '98.
Also, support for Win2K ends in 2010. Microsoft has thus successfully kept a school away from the alternatives, without giving them the next 5 years free.
"Be light, stinging, insolent and melancholy"
He should have used open source and free software instead of going out and buying things. Norton and McAffee and other commercial anti-viruses are a nightmare. I've been using AVG Free for a long time, and it's top notch. http://free.grisoft.com/doc/download-free-anti-virus/us/frt/0
Glad to see that precocious geekery hasn't died out with this generation. Kudos to you, kid!
First rule of trauma: Bleeding always stops.
This either means he is smart, or there are a ton of people out there who are overpaid (probably the latter).
If the systems work well, I'd want to see his resume as soon as he's legal to employ. He'd beat the tar out of a lot of MCSE's I've seen in the last 5 years.
Has anyone offered to send the school a box of Ubuntu live CD's, just to ease this young man's workload of maintaining Windows boxes?
I'm not much older than him, and I've started ~3 open source projects, and contributed to several, I know around 5 programming languages, and I set up/configured my 6 computer home network when I was 8. "We spent $2,158," Why not go do everything for *free*, and save money in the future for not being trapped to antivirus subscriptions?
I'm not that impressed. I was maintaining a lab of 16 Atari 800's when I was roughly his age. If he were smart, he'd switch to a less virus-resistant platform - I mean, we never had any problems.
Way to screw up a Feel Good story with the facts, Sherlock! I'm surprised you didn't home in on the Microsoft Solution and bleat about Linux.
I bet this kid gets shoved into so many lockers for being a suck-up to the administration when NetworkWorld isn't writing articles about him.
I remember this kid when I was in school. He was not a popular kid.
ShortFormBlog: Writing a little. Saying a lot.
Poor kid. The Wesley Crusher similarities are horrifying. "Wesley, go to your room!"
>north
You're an immobile computer, remember?
Hmm... Maybe I'll check out Slashdot. Oh! There's a heartwarming IT story. [Pause. The sound of counting the technicians we have. Quick check of the numbers that we're administering.]
"Hey, John? Can we get a list of all the 16-year-olds on the network? Yeah, thanks."
I'm currently running the Windows 98 SE upgrade on a Windows 95 laptop with 16MB of RAM. So far it's only been upgrading for 11 days, and has already reached 10% completion. (It's a Dell Latitude P133, fyi...)
I thought you can't get security updates for win2000 any more? If so that's a BAD upgrade path.
An 11-year old isn't legal to work, there are these pesky child labor laws in this country (duh).
The child labor laws don't stop you from hiring children.(tho your insurance might complain) They limit the types of jobs and the hours they can work. I have a 17 year old working for me at my store when she started she was 16 just above the cutoff point but still regulated as to what kinds of jobs she could do. She only works weekends for a few hours a day but it gets her use to the idea of getting to work on time and doing her job (well when she's not being a giggly teenage girl).
You can find the rules here:
http://www.dol.gov/dol/topic/youthlabor/
The article doesn't say, and if I had to guess, it would be no... so your comment may not be too far off the mark. Shoe string budget indeed. I wonder how often they pull him out of classes and interrupt his education to rescue the network. Child prodigy or child slave labor?
I think they got the title mixed up.
Wow, an 11 year-old kid goes out of the way to do some good for his school, including scoring his IT department free-as-in-beer software, and you act like a jackass because you don't like his methods.
This might actually be a new low for you.
Of course it's legal - if they don't pay him! They merely treat it as any other unpaid student-held post, like Yearbook Editor or Class Secretary.
Is he administrating a network? Yes. Then he's a network administrator.
Just because you require more from an administrator doesn't mean he isn't one. Don't piss on the kid's parade.
"It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him." - Tolkien
It's not just about an 11-year-old who took over a network admin job. Note the parts of the story about updating the computers, updating the (much needed) virus protection, and getting a gateway appliance to make sure that didn't happen again.
It's about an 11-year-old who took over a network admin job and immediately started off doing a better job than his predecessor. Kind of makes you wonder who that sad sack was, doesn't it?
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
Wait until the PHBs hear about this one.
Network Admin: My job is hard; I want a raise. ...sputters incoherently...
PHB: Why? Your job is so easy, an 11-year old can handle it!
Network Admin:
Every IT manager will have to live with this nightmare, until the Jedi really start getting a headache.
Never confuse movement with action. --Hemingway
Dmitri is from the Bay Area who has been contributing to the Drupal project and maintaining some modules.
The funny and amazing part is that he is 12 years old, and was 10 years old when he started with the community. The co-maintainers of the modules did not know he was that young when he started contributing patches and gave him CVS access to their modules, based on what patches he contributed already.
When Google started the Google Highly Open Participation (GHOP) for high school students, he was too young to qualify, so instead he was mentoring the 15 year old high school kids!
He even presented a session at DrupalCon Boston.
When I saw Dmitri, I felt happy and humbled. I just did not think he is so short!
See also:
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
That's nothing, by the time I was 11 I had already been running all the networks in my district for 5 years, *and* I had Slackware on all school machines by 7! It wasn't until 12 that I began consulting for the Federal Reserve, although in retrospect I should have taken the NASA gig instead.
I would have started my career sooner, but for most of my Kindergarten year I was under contract to the NSA.
have you been seen on slash?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
In high school, a bunch of my friends were helping out on the computer network, either for credit as an independent study, or just to learn it. Everything from making cables to desktop support. I befriended the network administrator, who let me do some supervised work on the servers... I used the experience to take and pass the MCSE exams. When looking for part time work as a college student, it was a lot easier to make beer money as a network guy than a lab rat, the 5x page didn't hurt
He is getting experience, and he's learning some basic skills. I'm sure the school will bring in someone experienced when they need to do something real, but what's wrong with this student stepping up and learning a bit. The school gets the network kept going cheaply, he gets valuable experience. It may not be much now, but in 3 years, he'll have plenty of experience to get a good after school job, instead of a crappy one.
Circumcision is child abuse.
Good for him. There are a lot of things that kids and teens can do if they are given support. As for being a network/systems administrator, I believe that he is one by definition. Almost anyone can be a network/systems administrator. What is hard to find are good skilled administrators with tons of experience. However, he definitely is not a network engineer (Hey, listen to all of the mechanical, civil, etc. Engineers scream in unison that only THEY are engineers). Network engineering requires a much higher skill level, one that takes into account the entire infrastructure and a large range of experience with all types of systems and devices. David BTW: Can we dispense with the MCSE bashing? If there were no MCSE program, there would be just as many unskilled people applying for technical positions. Also remember, and I am guilty of this too, not everyone has the experience or institutional knowledge (which brings a greater insight to problem solving) as you do. The question is, how quickly do they learn and do they repeat the same mistakes.
'These computers are so old they don't support all antivirus programs,' Penn says.
The computers are too old to support all antivirus programs? What does that even mean? To be fair, brand new computers do not support all antivirus programs either, since there are incompatibilities between various Windows releases.
Letting an 11y/o provide support and give advice for a network of any importance, regardless of how smart he is, will lead to many critical mistakes. The statement I quoted is a good example of this. The kid went to CompUSA, talked to an employee, and then came back to repeat what the employee told him. This isn't news.
In all likelyhood, he probably either hasn't heard of Linux, he isn't allowed to install Linux or other FOSS, or the computers are so bad that windows 2000 probably actually runs better on the machines. I live in Alabama, and did the same thing for my teacher's assistant period, albeit while in the 7th and 8th grade. Depending on the county he lives in, he's probably adminining machines with an average spec of: AMD K6 series or Intel Pentium 2/3 series processors, 128 MB RAM, integrated video, 4-10 GB HDD,CD ROM drive. Maybe (hopefully)he has something better to work with. In my county (Morgan), the majority of the computers we had to work with were donations (throwaways) from Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville. As far as FOSS goes, his county likely has a mandate that his school install McAfee AV (oh the horror) on every computer in the school, networked or not. FOSS, including Firefox, was simply not allowed on the machines. The only way to get permission to use FOSS would be to climb the bureaucratic chain all the way to the county Superintendent of Education, who likely doesn't know a whit about computers and is likely to view anything free (as in beer) with suspicion.
"We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security." Dwight Eisenhower
My high school, due to a "budget crisis", fired all the IT staff and hired 2 IT people for the entire school district a week before school started. Yes, you heard me right: these 2 people were responsible for maintaining not only the computers for a high school with 2,000 kids in it, but also the 16 other elementary, middle, and high schools in the district. Basically, the main domain for the district is in the high school, and all the other domain controllers in the other schools connect via VPN to the high school.
They were horribly over-worked, and often the students suffered. For instance, they recently installed a new server, which required them to take down the old server and copy all the files to it... during the school day because the district couldn't afford to pay them overtime. So for a week we had NO COMPUTERS because the server was being fixed. And, whenever an issue were to happen at another school, the IT people would have to run over there, leaving no one to fix the problem they were working on before.
So many of the things the school makes them do causes all the issues. Like the Group Policy settings that restrict EVERYTHING imaginable, from the File menu to the Task Manager. This causes major headaches because students and teachers have to call them down to fix something because the Group Policy blocks them from fixing it themselves, like switching printers and program shortcuts, taking more time away from them.
I think he listened to me about the Group Policy though, one day they were less restrictive (although they were still very annoying, you could at least use Task Manager to end processes, which is very important because programs crash on those computers every day).
But if I were an IT person like that 11 year old, things would be different. Linux would be used instead, no expensive office programs or tutoring software, just open-source stuff that does everything the current expensive programs do, and decent support.
Sometimes the over-workness shows. For instance, in my middle school, I noticed that there were no security permissions on everyone's files, so anyone who knew how to load the Finder on the Mac computers and navigate to the servers (like me) could get access to EVERYTHING on them. I told the IT person about the issue, she fixed it in a day. But God only knows how long those files were accessible...
With kids learning more about computers (I learned basic computer stuff when I was 6, older programming languages like QBasic and Visual Basic when I was 10, Linux when I was 12, and C++ right now), why not give the kids who can be trusted these responsibilities?
Two things. One, You are absolutely correct. The story should read. "11-year old has parents who got him special treatment!"
That being said. Big whoop if the kid is a network admin. It's not that hard. Is it really doubtful that an 11 year old can install an OS, install some software, and help a few people with their computers? How many of us started programming younger than that? How money of us cut our teeth on computers in the 80's? These machines were harder to use than a network is to run today. Especially when you have someone to step in when you run into something you can't handle.
As for the 11 year old being legal to work. There are a couple of things. First, there are all sorts of exemptions for various jobs like acting, modeling, and whatnot, but at least here in California, but for all intents and purposes it is illegal to hire anyone under 12 for most jobs. Network administrator would definitely fall into that category.
Exceptions that the school could be using is the "self-employed" exemption. This is questionable though, as it is likely that the school dictates where and when he does the job, so he may not legally be self employed. The other "exemption" is that schools have never followed child labor laws themselves. Child labor has traditionally been a method of punishment in public schools. Children are often put to work underage, outside of legal work hours, and without compensation. I have never heard of a state stepping in and stopping this behavior. It is just one of those lawless aspects of our public school system. I know when I was in school, I always wondered how the public schools could get away with what is for all intents and purposes slavery. If a school can force students to perform janitorial services with no compensation, we cannot expect anyone to stop them from allowing a student to perform IT services.
Really, though this comes story boils down to the fact that it is just not that impressive that someone 11 years old can do the job of network administrator. For most of human history, this person would have been on the cusp of adulthood. 11 only sounds young because we artificially retard our population so that most never learn to function until much later.
The first rule of being a Network Admin is not to let others know that an 11 year old could do it.
I'm not sure what windows 2000 will prove. I have already ran into software that simply won't run on anything other the XPsp2 or better. MS can end support for early versions of XP also.
I agree, it is a play to keep them from going elsewhere, but a limited one at that. It is pretty sad when an 11 year old knows more then the people (teachers and school administration) who have been working with the stuff for that last 20 years or longer. Maybe this is more to save paying someone then anything.
Schools can force students to perform unpaid labour like 'picking up litter' for the same reason they can force students to perform unpaid labour like 'each student must make a perfect copy of what is written on this blackboard'. It's education, not labour. In the case of litter-picking or floor-mopping, it's teaching 'don't be a dick' or 'sit down, shut up and work when told to or you'll end up mopping floors for a living' rather than calculus, but it's still inflicting learning on the unwilling. Can you tell I work in a school?
Yes, they're getting the unpaid services of an IT administrator - but then they're getting the results of an inexperienced 11 year old in his first post who's learning in-situ. Hope they contract out their email services!
"For most of human history, this person would have been on the cusp of adulthood. 11 only sounds young because we artificially retard our population so that most never learn to function until much later."
I do however take exception to this. 11 was on the verge of adulthood if you were a pre bronze age child or if you live in a subsistance-poor family at any point, including currently. Children didn't sexually mature until much later than now, even into their 20's, due to malnutrition. In the wealthier sections of society, even in the iron age, children were much older than 11 before taking the full mantle of responsibility.
Children are sexually mature earlier than ever, but lack the reasoning capacity to use it properly it often seems. We also require them to know a hell of a lot more than they used to function in our society - not many jobs down the coal mines or running under the weaving machines any more. We are a more technologically advanced society, though intra-socially we're little different than the romans. I doubt you'd find many roman 11 year olds capable of being a network administrator, even if they could work a shift on the farm.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
Wow. You are a perfect example of why home schooling is becoming more popular.
"it's teaching 'don't be a dick' or 'sit down, shut up and work when told to or you'll end up mopping floors for a living' rather than calculus, but it's still inflicting learning on the unwilling."
Really? Really? Have you ever actually listened to what your saying? Those are not the words of an educator, but of a bully who knows that he has his victims cornered. You can rationalize why your child slave labor is OK, but you and I know perfectly well that you are not doing it because you think it will make them better educated.
"I do however take exception to this. 11 was on the verge of adulthood if you were a pre bronze age child or if you live in a subsistance-poor family at any point, including currently. Children didn't sexually mature until much later than now, even into their 20's, due to malnutrition. In the wealthier sections of society, even in the iron age, children were much older than 11 before taking the full mantle of responsibility."
Take exception if you want, but it is true. Look at the rights of passage into adulthood for most cultures in the world. Things like the bar/bat mitzvah. They are almost always at 12 or 13. I don't know what country you live in, but less than a hundred years ago, right here in the U.S. wasn't uncommon for 13 to 16 year olds to get married.
Take a look at historical life expectancies. For your claim to be true, most of your classical Roman's not only never bread because they were dead before they could have children, and most of those that did breed, never saw their children's 11th birthday.
"Children are sexually mature earlier than ever,"
I've been hearing this since I was a kid in the early 70's. In the 70's, girls were on average hitting puberty between 11 and 13, although it was not unheard of for it to be as young as 8 or 9. So, for this to be true, the average age of puberty would have to be averaging 8 or 9 now at least. As far as I know, that is not the case. A quick search showed that it is currently at 12.5.
"but lack the reasoning capacity to use it properly it often seems"
That's right. People like you train them "sit down, shut up and work when told to". It's no suprise that they are developing slower and slower. Of course that is the point. The sad thing is that the retardation is environmental, not genetic.
"We also require them to know a hell of a lot more than they used to function in our society"
The only more that we expect them to know now that we did not expect before is that we expect them to be able to read, although not particularly well. This is a task that a bright child can learn to do well by 3, and a slow one can easily learn by 6 or 7. Your belief that most modern people know significantly more than people used to is cultural bias. Life in modern America is so simple, and so little knowledge is required of people that most modern Americans could simply not function in older environments.
"I doubt you'd find many roman 11 year olds capable of being a network administrator, even if they could work a shift on the farm."
Gee, you doubt that someone who had never seen a computer, could be a network administrator? Go figure. Of course, I doubt that you will find many 11 year olds today that can speak Latin and make an authentic Roman shield. Heck, that is even with hind site in their favor. Why? Because people don't learn things they are not exposed to, which is why so many people are now retarded. Because they are called children for a half to whole decade after they reach adulthood.
Your belief that historically people were considered children into their 20's is simply revisionist history, and you are helping with the dumbing down of modern America.