Most companies don't really consider hiring high schoolers as interns, making it hard for us to get real world experience in a company at this age. Who is?
Pick out some local companies you would be interested in working as an intern at? Stop by see if you can get a tour, make connections, inquire if they have an internship program.
Most fun/tech companies love helping kids. We coach a lego robotics team and have gotten lots of tours, demos and even a meeting space for our team at a local startup.
All by calling, stopping by, following up and asking politely.
An internship would be a little different, but if you get to know people at a company it makes it much easier.
It's not just about school. Age 18 is a magic number in our law. Without that, a contract with you is pretty sketchy. Being under 18 also limits your hours, work environment, job duties, and so on.
Businesses that typically employ under-18 people are prepared to deal with all that. Other places don't want the bother and the risk, even if there wouldn't actually be any trouble.
I'm currently pretty familiar with webapp backend development with Python, Flask, and a bunch of its plugins (SQLA, WTF, Jinja, etc) and Python in general. I'm also exploring Rust and am beginning to feel comfortable in it. I have experience with all sorts of miscellaneous stuff, but these two are the ones I'm most involved in at the moment.
I'm currently working on a CMS-ish style scheduling platform for CTF competitions, an ptrace-based application sandbox in Rust, an online judge system (like a programming assignment grader), and an IRC server in Rust with Tokio and futures.
I have a good amount of experience with cybersecurity and algorithms and data structures too despite a lack of formal education in them ;)
Most fun/tech companies love helping kids. We coach a lego robotics team and have gotten lots of tours, demos and even a meeting space for our team at a local startup.
All by calling, stopping by, following up and asking politely.
An internship would be a little different, but if you get to know people at a company it makes it much easier.