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Eight year-old whizz becomes Actel chip tester
AN EIGHT year-old kid is QAing software to run Actel chips.
According to American-Statesman, Carson Page is a computer whizz-kid who taught himself to run computer applications on his PC soon after he could walk. By age four, he could install an operating system on his own and fix driver problems.
At seven he was programming circuits with software from chip maker Actel.
Now the Silicon Valley outfit has him evaluating an upcoming version of its software. So far he has detected several bugs.
Mark Nagel, a field applications engineer for Actel said his company had never before used a primary school kid to test its software.
However the kid seems to have got the hang of it and could say what he liked and didn't like about the stuff he's fiddling with at a high-end level, Nagel said.
Children tend to work a bit cheaper than adults. For his work, Carson received a $250 gift certificate to Fry's Electronics, which he used to buy an MP3 player, two computer games and a microphone for his Skype Internet-based phone connection.
If this all seems on the cheapish side, just remember in Dr Spinola's day they used to send kids up chimneys. µ
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Well, if you read the whole Statesman article, you'll see that he's not just finding bugs. Being able to evaluate an EDA tool and to intelligently compare it to alternative products requires both broad and deep knowledge about this kind of tools. Impressive. 

Here are some excerpts from the original artice:

"We would ask what he liked and didn't like about it and he could explain it on a very high-end level," 

"He had done other things with other companies' tools, so we asked what about ours did you like better? What do they do better?" says Nagel, who plans to put Carson to work testing future software releases. "It's amazing; when you talk to him it's like you're talking to a regular guy doing design." 

This looks like child-labour...isn't that forbidden by law?
Come on now Nick - in Doc Spinola's day they used to dangle children out of the cave to distract sabretooth tigers....
It was more than a decade ago, but I once had the pleasure of sitting down with a piece of test industry software that cost my company about $250,000. It didn't work. It really was completely incapable of performing its primary function. Just poking around in the menus and functions that worked, I filled four pages with blatant and obvious bugs.

So, I'm not that impressed that an 8-year old could find plenty of bugs in software. What amazes me is that the tree-stumps-for-brains that write such software can't be bothered to weed out the bugs before they let anyone else see it. Have they no pride at all?