I work for a startup e-commerce company which uses Catalyst as the frame for some of the front facing applications. The developers, QA testers, and development (dev and qa inclusive) managers all have admin rights to their PC. IMO its much easier to allow local admin rights rather than bugging the sysadmins every time they (read 'we') need to install a piece of software. The sysadmins have enough on their plate without babysitting the development team.

I agree. We have some brilliant developers who will ask an occasional Windoze question. I grew up in a Windoze env, so in retort, I ask the occasional Linux question. :)

We recently had a complete overhaul of the company/development team, to include creation of business requirements gathering and proper coding standards. The prior development team had a few developers with admin access who would change code on the fly without sysadmin approval/procedure. Code would then be "backdated" in order to trickle the production changes down to the other developers. Sometimes the production fix didn't always work. Imagine the customer/customer/end-user experience if your site was Javascript intensive/dependent and worked one moment but broke the next?

Curious about PCs, eh? I started crashin 'em when I was 13. In the grander scheme, I'll still a youngen in my mid 20s, so compared to all those sysadmin gurus, I know squat. :P What did spark my interest around that age was HTML. HTML is an easy language to learn and gives those instants results so many before have suggested. It lays a foundation for your child to build on but can also introduce him to so many other concepts (proper coding standards, other languages to build on such as PHP or Javascript, proper tag closing, browser interpretation, etc) of programming. Really it'll depend on both what you and your son are comfortable with. HTML is a rather easy language to pickup and has many avenues you can venture down. However, if he doesn't want to be bothered with anything to do w/ the web AT ALL you may try something else...