Doug Marcey, 17, is able to rent his own three-bedroom town house with the $50,000 a year he makes for working three days a week. (By James A. Parcell/The Washington Post)

By Eric L. Wee
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 1, 1998; Page A1

Life is good. That's what Doug Marcey will tell you as he sits in his basement on this Friday morning.

While others fight their way to the office, he's writing computer code in his jeans and bare feet in front of two blazing 21-inch monitors. The job pays well. For his work three days a week, a software company forks over $50,000 a year, enough to rent his three-bedroom town house in Fairfax County. Not a bad life.

Especially considering that Doug Marcey is only 17.

Computer companies in Washington and elsewhere, facing a shortage of tech talent, increasingly are turning to teenagers such as Doug to help fill out their employment rosters. Computer jocks as young as 14 are working as programmers, graphics artists and Web page designers, some of them drawing very adult salaries, using skills acquired in high school classes and during hours of surfing the Internet.

The rich job market even has some of the teenagers facing the sort of decisions that gifted athletes make: Do I stay in school or turn pro and make some big money?

"I got tired of high school," said Doug, who last fall chose not to return for his senior year at Fairfax's Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology.

"It got too boring. I took all the computer courses I could and basically learned all that I could," said Doug, a 6-foot-4-inch baby-faced teenager in new Armani glasses who figures he'll still get a college diploma. "I was realizing that I could go out and work. ... The cool thing about computers is that I can make lots of money doing what I really like doing."

So three days a week, Doug does everything from Web site work to helping make the company's programs more enticing to customers. The rest of the time, he takes classes at George Mason University. He's considering working full time, which would bump his salary to $70,000.

David Rosenfeld hired Doug at Nu Thena Systems Inc., a McLean company that creates software programs to let places such as Boeing Co. and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory model and test ideas on computers.

Rosenfeld figured if he didn't snap up Doug, someone else would. Indeed, Doug said he got a half-dozen offers after his junior year.

"There aren't that many programmers out there that are really creative," Rosenfeld said. "There are plenty who will do what you tell them to do, but there aren't many who can see a new way to do things. That's another tier of people, and I thought Doug was one of them. If you can get your hands on someone like that, you never let them go."

Washington area computer executives say that it's unclear how many teenagers are getting full- and part-time work from the area's high-tech companies but that they're sure it's becoming more common. The Washington Post interviewed nine such teenagers.

Nationally, the U.S. Department of Labor says, 22,000 teenagers ages 16 to 19 worked in the computer and data-processing industry last year, more than four times the number three years earlier.

Mario Morino, one of the Washington area's early successful technology entrepreneurs who now runs a Herndon-based technology think tank, said the nationwide shortage of high-tech workers has made those teenagers more attractive to companies. But even without the labor drought, Morino said, the youths would be enticing because of their incredible skills.

Employers say teenagers have an advantage in the cyber job market because they're often up on the newest technologies. While adult workers have time commitments such as families, teenagers can spend hours on the Internet, downloading and experimenting with the latest programs.

Federal work regulations don't allow anyone younger than 14 to work for pay. And 14- and 15-year-olds can put in only 18 hours a week during the school year. Those restrictions disappear at 16. The rules are there in part, Labor Department officials say, to make sure that work doesn't interfere with studies.

That's a concern of Donald Hyatt, director of Thomas Jefferson High School's computer laboratory. He said he constantly gets requests from companies for prospective employees and doesn't have enough students to fill all the summer internships offered. Every one of his seniors, he said, could leave school and make a large salary.

But he tries to convince them that they won't develop to their full potential that way. College offers opportunities to learn from top programmers, he argues, not to mention the value of getting a solid, broad-based education. And when it comes time for cyclical layoffs, he adds, those without college degrees often will be the first to go.

Seth Berger, a sophomore at Langley High School, isn't so sure. He said his computer work has taught him much more than any class. Seth looks like any other 16-year-old. He wears faded jeans and Nike Airs. He says "cool" often, and when he smiles, his braces show. But Seth is the computer graphics core of a company called Creative Edge Software Inc. – maker of a new martial arts computer game called "The Untouchable."

Travis Riggs, Seth's boss, said that soon after he was hired last year at age 15, it became clear that Seth was the company's best computer graphics specialist. Seth will get a percentage of the net profits from the game, which he said could add up to more than $50,000. Riggs has hired him for a second game and made him the sole computer graphics artist, bumping his cut to a six-figure sum if that game does well.

"I don't know if I'm going to go to college, especially since I can make money like this," Seth said. "If college costs 25 grand, for me it's going to cost $25,000, plus what I could be making. I'm going to go to college and spend [the equivalent of] $80,000 a year, to learn stuff I already know? That doesn't make sense to me when I look at it that way."

His mother, retired physician Amy Dwork-Berger, said she and her husband have accepted that Seth probably won't attend college. She sees him as an extremely bright person who would be frustrated by college's regimentation. And she sees his success in computer work as a positive influence on his life.

"It's been marvelous," she said. "College isn't the only way to learn. Seth doesn't fit the mold, and to make the most of his potential, you have to let him do what he needs to do. ... He's happy. He's good at it. What more could a parent want?"

Bruce Hurwitz takes a somewhat different view for his son, Gus, 17, who worked last summer for Netrix, a Herndon computer networking company. Gus also sells a program over the Internet that lets people access their computers remotely or set up Web pages. That now brings in from $750 to $2,500 a month.

Gus said that last year he was seriously considering not returning for his senior year, in part because computer work seemed more challenging. But he decided to stick with school and college plans after talking it over with his parents.

His father, a data communications executive for a French company, said he has worked to explain to Gus that college is a valuable time for exploring new, varied interests. And he warns his son that he won't always be the young hotshot, because new technologies will surface down the road.

"I'm nervous that he's 17 about to go on 40," he said. "I want him to be a child and enjoy himself. I want him to be exposed to the liberal arts and other things. I don't want him to be just a computer guy."

But as a computer guy, Gus is clearly exceptional. He tackled some of the company's most difficult tasks at the bargain rate of $9 an hour. Netrix's senior engineers "had their jaws to the ground" in amazement as Gus showed them new ways of doing things.

Randy Hare, Gus's former boss, estimates that Gus is as qualified as a typical senior-level system administrator in his thirties making $80,000 a year.

Although employers rave about such young computer aces, they say hiring teenagers can complicate workplace dynamics.

Datametrics Systems Corp., in Fairfax, got a taste of that when it hired Brent Metz, now 17, for the last two summers. The company, which sells a program that examines large computer systems for inefficiencies, gave Brent a project and predicted that it would take him six to eight weeks. He finished it in a week and a half.

"I think there were a couple of [adult programmers] who felt threatened," said Grady Ogburn, a manager at Datametrics. "Up to that point, their programming efforts were shrouded in mystery. ... They're experienced programmers taking x number of weeks to accomplish tasks, and everybody thinks that's a reasonable amount of time. Now here's this 16-year-old bringing all those estimates into question."

Brent's salary soon shot to $20 an hour, and Ogburn believed he was worth double that. Now Brent is starting his own Web page design company.

Although the junior employees generally blend in, employers say, you can't get away from the fact that they are, well, young.

Seth Berger's employer often has someone spend nearly an hour traveling to pick him up after school and bring him to the Dulles area office, because he can't drive yet.

A California software company that hired a 10-year-old for the summer two years ago had to get used to seeing its new software evaluator play with the copy machine on his breaks. They also had to accept the grammatical errors in his reports – understandable because he learned to write only a few years before.

But most say the young people's raw enthusiasm can be like a shot of adrenaline for other company employees. And Rosenfeld, like other bosses, said he'll give some jobs to 17-year-old Doug Marcey rather than an adult programmer because Doug doesn't yet know "what's impossible." Adults might give up, he said, but Doug will keep pushing.

Elliott Frutkin also believes in young talent. Last summer, he dug through 200 resumes but still couldn't find the right person to create graphics for his Georgetown startup Web page company, Ideal Computer Strategies. Finally he found the person he was looking for: the company's 14-year-old unpaid intern, Josh Foer.

Frutkin said Josh, unlike others, could do advanced graphics work and understood how to translate the customers' concepts onto the computer. His pay jumped to $10 an hour and later to $25 an hour for urgent projects.

Josh, now 15, said it's changed the way he thinks about money. He recalls a friend who worked at a toy store saying he made more than $100 after putting in a long week. "That's the kind of thing I could make in a day, not working very hard," Josh said.

Now Frutkin does everything he can to entice Josh back, including offering to pay him an hourly rate equal to at least $35,000 a year.

"In today's market, it's impossible to find someone with those skills," Frutkin said. "The next ad I run may be in a high school newspaper rather than The Washington Post."