Just had my oldest come into the office two weeks ago. He didn’t seem particularly excited about shadowing me at first since I have a desk job as a programmer. In the morning a user of our API was wanting a copy of our example Rest calls to use as references for their implementation. Unfortunately the ones I had were only used for personal testing and weren’t really usable due to junk data/comments in the files. I showed him how Git works and had him add the files. I had him make a branch and then told him how to clean up the files. After that he zipped up the files and we sent them to the client. He was very happy he could actually do something productive.

In the afternoon I asked him what computer problem he has had in the past that he wanted to solve. Him and I paired together and we solved the problem. He was pretty happy about that too. Overall he seemed impressed with what his old man does everyday which is saying something as he usually is only interested in motorbikes cars and sports.

Overall I would definitely recommend doing it as it is very good exposure into working life that they don’t normally see.