Eighth-Grade Programmer Hire

Shaan shares a story about hiring a young programmer who started in eighth grade and eventually worked full-time while still in high school.

"We hired a kid when I was doing a startup in San Francisco. We had a guy who was in eighth grade and he emailed me, Johnny Dallas, and he said, 'Hey, I love to code. My dad met somebody - I met Pete at a dog park, our sysadmin guy, and he was like I don't know anyone else who codes. Can I just come hang out for the summer? I just want to be around other programmers.'

I was like, 'Oh man, amazing, yes for sure.' He comes in first day, we just actually give him a test. We're like, 'Hey, we want you to make this little onboarding quiz HTML, just make a quiz like multiple choice, take them down a flow and land them in one of these four buckets.'

He just sits there. He sits there till like seven or eight at night. I feel bad, but he's not asking for help. I just want to see how it plays out, and he actually ships the quiz at the end of the evening. I was like, 'Alright, this kid's legit.'

By the time he's in tenth grade, we're like, this guy's working basically full time for me. He's coming in after school. So we had a conversation with his mom. I remember at downtown, and she's like, 'I can't imagine my son being like a high school dropout.' And I said, 'Do you know LeBron James and Kobe Bryant? Your son is going pro.' And so I think that should be a little bit of advice if any kid is listening to this - it worked like a charm on that mom. Try this on your mom or try this on anybody where you can really go pro early."