Summer job in Austin for a 16 year old - Does this exist anymore? (home, theater)

[austin-steve]

My (soon to be) 16 year old daughter really wants a part time job this summer. Who hires teenagers for summer jobs anymore? Just looking for some good leads or ideas for her.
Steve

[Aquitaine]

Big box store cashier? They hired teenagers 15 years ago (at least on the East coast)...don't know if that's changed. Dull job but some places will take you seasonally and she might have the option to return over school breaks if she's going to college.

Lots of internet jobs if she's computer savvy (I should say, lots of places looking for even inexperienced web people if they don't cost much)

I assume most teenagers don't want to hang around outside in the summertime in Austin so I'll skip those.

[hoffdano]

Some retailers hire kids this age. And two of my three kids made very good money as lifeguards.

[love roses]

YMCA, lifeguarding, any other summer camps, retailers like Gap/Justice/etc...., fast food places, movie theatres, maybe live theatres.

[Dr.Mom]

Could you tell us a little about her interests? That might allow for some more personalized options.

[Trainwreck20]

If she is in to theater, the Zilker Theater Productions is doing the Sound of Music this summer. They pay something (but not huge). OTOH, I think they just finished auditions.

The Oak Hill Gazette (or whatever it is called) lists teenagers willing to do yard work, baby sitting, and tutoring, maybe? They have some list in there, but I forget all the categories.

HEB hires some part timers for sacking with the option to move up to checker rather quickly. Not the most glamorous, but it is work.

As mentioned above, life guarding is fairly well paid, but can be stressful and is out in the heat all day.

Most restaurants will hire 16 y/o hostesses, since that is a very hard spot to fill, believe it or not, with half-way competent people. Older kids will want to wait tables (much better money), but 16 y/os cannot. It is actually more work than it looks like, and not huge money (hostesses get sent home before the restaurant closes), but if you plan to work part time as a waiter at some point in the future, it is a really good starting point.

[austin-steve]

Originally Posted by Dr.Mom

Could you tell us a little about her interests? That might allow for some more personalized options.

She's pretty flexible. Outdoors is ok. She took robotics this year and will be taking a Java programming class next year, and she's on the STEM track, good in math, so something in that area she would love.

Lots of internet jobs if she's computer savvy (I should say, lots of places looking for even inexperienced web people if they don't cost much)

Aquitaine, I figured there are college intern jobs like this but didn't know companies might hire a 16 year old. Is there a resource for these types of openings?

Steve

[Aquitaine]

Well...there's me We are always on the hunt for dedicated young programmers - we're a small business and so our full-time people are higher-end and it's not efficient for us to take on some jobs that are more "web site maintenance" with only a little programming. Typically what we (and others, I suspect) are looking for is more along the lines of a college Freshman with at least a little bit of CS under their belts.

I got a call from a guy who runs the Circle C business directory and he was telling me that lots of small businesses want web sites but can't afford to pay pro rates for them. This was true ten or twelve years ago as well -- first projects I ever took on were local businesses that paid me a few hundred bucks!

I'm not really aware of a central place for this type of thing though. I'd check UT and ACC's CS people -- a lot of times college departments need these people too as it was always the case when I worked for a big university years ago that you had admin assistants managing web sites who didn't want to be managing web sites.

I think if I were in your position with a child who was interested in that sort of thing, I'd focus on learning a tool like Drupal that could be easily applied to most small businesses and has a lower learning curve, and then after that I'd pick up PHP or .NET or Ruby -- Java is an excellent introduction to concepts used in all these languages but I doubt you'd find much work for a teenage Java programmer unless she's good enough to write her own product and market it. I sure wasn't at that age!

Sorry I can't be more helpful though. My experience is that most of the work along these lines doesn't ever make it to a job posting, because people know that hiring an actual web developer can run anywhere from 40 to 90k. I've posted jobs looking for paid interns before and got very little. But if you can find something, it's really nice, because you can do the work from anywhere and usually it'll stick with you for several years until you outgrow it.

[noellestar]

Seasonal jobs: ice cream, frozen yogurt, sno cone/ smoothie shops. Jamba juice hires 16 year olds I think.

[centralaustinite]

Since she is interested in STEM, try Girlstart, also look at Robotics Camp, IDTech, all sorts of camps in Austin need older teens to supervise and instruct younger ones. She could also tutor.