What jobs are available for 14-year-olds in California?

What jobs can a 15 year old do in California?

• I turned 15 in february, and i live in california, i was wondering what kind of jobs i could do since summer is coming up and i need some money to buy a new dslr camera. My friend is also going to be working with me if i can find us a job. Im not looking for those lawn mowing jobs or babysitting favor jobs. I need something that pays minimum wage.

• Answer:

  I'm going to give you a job tip for starting your own computer business in a minute. First off, I will warn that there are a ton of people that will try to convince you that they will help you have an online business that you can do from home on your computer. When people like you post these types of questions at least several of the answerers (scam vultures) will try to get you hooked on some scheme. There is just no such thing as online jobs that you can do from home that pay any real money. The huge majority of these are scams and the people that encourage you to do them and tell you how much money they have made, are all a part of the scam. The scam may be selling things, data entry or other similar ploys. Remember that data entry has been made obsolete by Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software which can read that characters in a document and translate those into text for you. Re-typing information is completely outdated and unneeded. Cut and paste jobs fall into the same category. The same goes for gifting businesses. Many of these schemes require some kind of up front registration fee. They are all designed to take your money or to take your personal information. With that information they can steal your personal identity and empty your bank account or mess up your credit. I can't think of any more diabolical scam than to give people, like single parents hope that they are going to make some money and then dash those hopes by giving them nothing but empty promises. Also, scamming teenagers who are trying to help their families or trying to earn a few dollars of spending money is about as low as you can go, in my book. The add insult to injury I went out to one online job website just to see what they had to offer and their site tried to download malware to my computer. Here is my freebie business idea for you. If you want to do something at home involving computers just tell your friends and relatives that you are doing a PC and laptop virus cleaning service for $25-$35 and they must bring the computer to you. Go to the McAfee web site and download the Stinger.exe free tool and get a small thumb drive that you can copy that program to. When they bring the computer over you download the newest version of Stinger to the thumb drive and stick it in their computer and start the scan running. It may take a few minutes or a few hours depending on the computer's disk size and utilization. It requires no interaction so you just start it running and go do other things while it runs. After it is done it will list any stuff it found and you can report that to the user. Charge them an extra $5-$10 if they want to have an anti-virus program installed and you go out to Microsoft and install Microsoft Security Essentials (a free program). If they want an anti-malware program, charge them a few more dollars and download and install the free version of MalwareBytes for them. This cleanup is not technically hard and you can try it on your own computer to get the hang of it. Don't plan to fix the computer at their location as the Stinger scan can take 2-3 hours. Also, you need to coordinate this business venture with your parents so you don't get yourself into any difficult situations where people won't pay you or where you have to deal with creepy people. Putting ads or flyers out can be good and bad news as it may get you business but it may get you the risk of dealing with strangers. Honestly once the word gets out that you are doing the service you may have family and friends enough to keep you busy. Another thing to keep in mind is that sooner or later your customers will click on some link or go to some bad web site and pick up another virus that may bypass the free protection you installed. If you have done a good job they will be back for more help - and make you another $25 to fix it all over again. This is called repeat business! Also, you can contact all the pawn shops or thrift stores in your area and tell them you can do these same virus cleanup services for them. A common issue they have is getting in any computers that the password has been lost on and you tell them that you can break into those for them. Sometimes people will pawn a computer and then not get it out in time. When the pawn shop gets ready to sell it they discover the computer is password protected and they don't have the password. To perform the break-in you will download the free Trinity Rescue Kit and create a CD that will let you boot the computer and change the password without you needing to know the old password. The pawn shop may pay you in cash or store credit. You can work out a trade deal with them for music CDs, DVD movies, electronics or other items they may have for sale. These could be some baby steps for you to start into a career in computers!