Child exploitation, or a valuable start to life?

25 November 2001, 17:38 GMT

Some programmers hold a J2EE design meeting

In today's competitive business world, consultancies battle it out for an edge over their rivals that can help them win that all-important contract. Start-up softco Muddy Pants Ltd. believe that they have found the silver bullet that will take them to new heights whilst their competitors are still snuffling around in the bushes.

"We needed something to really set us apart from our competitors," Muddy Pants CTO and co-founder Larry Windfast explained. "Then, a few months ago I was dropping off my kids at pre-school, when the obvious answer suddenly hit me: these kids are our architects of the future... but why bother waiting?"

He explained: "Their chirpy, can-do attitude is something that we have been seeing less and less of in the adult programmers. We need programmers by the bucketload - we need them cheap, and we need them obedient, and we need them in great quantity. In short, infant schoolkids perfectly fit the bill."

"This will save our company millions!" the company's IT director William Bates quipped. "The problem is, senior programmers are just too damned awkward. You ask them to do something, and they respond with subversive challenges like 'Why?', or 'Wouldn't it be better if..?'"

Windfast cut in: "Kids, on the other hand, just do as they're told. And if they don't, then they sort of accept that they're going to be kept behind after work."

But isn't this a classic case of child exploitation? Aren't these children being introduced to the work environment much too early?

"Nonsense," Windfast retorted. "Our scheme is giving these kids valuable experience. It's been proven in stringent scientific tests, that you can improve a child's intelligence at an early age by exposing them to complex patterns and situations. In the long term, this will be much more useful to these kids than, say, school."

But what about the parents? Aren't they worried that their kids are being exploited?

"In fact," IT director Bates added, "the parents have been really keen to get their youngsters involved in this scheme. In many cases, we've provided impoverished families with second, third, even fourth incomes. Granted, these incomes are only about a tenth of an adult worker's salary - but with money as tight as it is these days, every penny counts."

Revolutionary stuff indeed. But how do they deal with the problem that infants are generally less intelligent than grown-ups?

"You'd be surprised at the ingenuity of a five year old," Bates laughed. "They have such a simplified, innocent window on life, totally uncluttered by the strange delusions of grand architecture that seem to afflict their adult counterparts. In fact, we've seen some great designs come from these kids."

"You know," Windfast cut in, "kids are just like drunk adults - no real hand-eye co-ordination, swaying around, bumping into things. But as long as they're sitting down and engrossed in whatever piece of code they're writing or debugging, then they're fine. To that end, we're early adopters of Windows XP with its bright, chunky Fisher-Price interface. It's almost as popular with the kids as with the dumbass adults."

"Granted," Bates added, "the toddlers sometimes write code that could be regarded as... questionable. But with a hall full of a couple hundred kids bashing out code, at least some of it will pass our strict quality control. That's more than can be said for some grown-up so-called programmers."

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