When the tech guy is 13 (or even 10)

Donald Garner Jr. was at his auto-salvage lot shooting the breeze last year when a customer mentioned that her nine-year-old twin sons had just gotten back from computer camp. Great skill to have, said Mr. Garner, who went on to complain about how much he was going to have to pay a pro to build a decent Web site. Why not ask her boys to do it?  the customer asked. He could pay them whatever he thought the results were worth. He thought about it. Why not? he replied.

Mr. Garner had to suppress a laugh when the boys showed up the next day with clipboards and serious looks. But he dutifully gave them a rough idea of what he had in mind, and then waved goodbye without particularly high expectations. A month later, he was stunned and delighted when they delivered exactly the sort of site he had had in mind. He dashed off a check for $2,000, but the boys would accept only $700. "They did a beautiful job -- just superb," Mr. Garner said.

It's really not surprising that some businesses are getting a technology assist from, well, children. They are way ahead of the rest of us on much of this stuff, having cut their teeth on it at home and at school. And they're thrilled to work for wages that a pro would sneer at at -- music to the ear of the cash-flow-conscious business owner.

Should you trust a teenager to develop a Web site? Sure, if you can afford to write the whole thing off if the kid messes it up or simply loses interest, a common hazard when employing the  young. If you're under time pressure, if the site is mission-critical, if you want customers to conduct complex transactions via the site, if you're in a sophisticated business that calls for a slick, dynamic Web presence, if you have serious data security needs, forget about it. Bite the bullet and spend the $5,000 or $20,000 or more that it takes to get a higher-shelf site.

Obviously that doesn't describe Donald Garner Jr.'s situation, and in fact most small businesses probably can afford to take a flier on a youngster who shows some Web-design skill. Some of these kids can produce great Web sites, said Pete Ingram-Cauchi, chief executive of iD Tech Camps, which operates computer camps all over the country -- including the one attended by Ross and Scott Padalino, the boys who developed Mr. Garner's site. "There are 13-year-olds who are just amazing programmers now," Mr. Ingram-Cauchi said. "They can put together Web sites that are fully up to professional standards, including embedded flash animation and video." The Padalino twins certainly seem to think Web site development is kid stuff. "The hardest part was interviewing Donny," said Ross. "But even that was only medium hard."

Of course, Web site design is one thing. Can a kid help run the computers and applications that are close to the guts of your business? Maybe. When Steven Freidkin was 13, he was setting up entire networks and software systems for small businesses at bargain-basement prices. But today, as a grizzled 26-year-old who runs a successful I.T. firm called Ntiva in McLean, Va., Mr. Freidkin looks back on his early work and wonders if it was a good idea. "There's a pretty good chance with a kid you'll end up having the systems fail at some point, you'll lose data, and you'll have a professional come in to clean up the mess for far more than you would have paid to have him come in in the first place," he said. "I can tell you about 30 examples from this year alone where I had to fix that sort of situation."

But Mr. Friedkin points out there's a way to have your cake and eat it, too: If you know of a teenager who seems to have the technical chops to handle a significant I.T. job, fine, but hire a pro to supervise. He has provided that sort of supervisory service to a number of customers who brought in kids to help with I.T., and he says it often allows the customer to save some money without much risk of something going wrong. He himself makes a point of hiring interns in their early teens -- they remind him of himself at that age -- and puts them on customer projects but only after training and under the watchful eye of a more experienced staffer. And even then he doesn't charge the customer for the kid's time. Mr. Friedkin's last-ditch advice to anyone who  insists on placing an important I.T. project in the hands of an unsupervised youngster: First, hire the teen to set up and maintain your home network and then try him out on a less-important business project.

But don't bother trying to hire the Padalino boys. They're 10 years old now, and they've already got a waiting list of companies that they're not getting through any time soon. "We've got a lot of homework, we play soccer, and we develop games for our own computer," Scott said.

On the other hand, if you're looking to invest in a computer-game development firm ...