
Appalachian Miners Are Learning to Code - magoghm
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-02-03/from-coal-to-coding-appalachian-miners-getting-a-fresh-start
======
nostromo
_I want to believe..._ But I suspect this will not be a winning approach for
most displaced coal miners.

What's interesting to me is that we have many reasonably well-paid trade
skills in America: plumbers, carpenters, masons, electricians, landscapers,
arborists, mechanics, etc.

Last year I paid $2,000 for a new lawn and another $1,500 to have a dying tree
removed. Both took a few hours for two people to complete. It wouldn't
surprise me if these guys are making more money than your average programmer.
I think we should try and promote these good jobs to both young people in
depressed areas, but also to adults looking for a new trade. Not everyone
needs to work in a cubical...

~~~
zardo
In depressed areas, you don't have many people with money to spend on home
improvement.

~~~
rm_-rf_slash
Home appliances and cars still break and need regular maintenance.

~~~
acveilleux
And that maintenance is minimized, avoided and cheapened out on as much as
possible. You know all those stories of poor people being ticketed for burned
out headlights and similar car problems?

I don't know anyone in the tech industry who ever have a burned out headlight
on their 2 years old leased car. Maybe it's because they can afford to have it
fixed and maybe it's cause they don't own, let alone drive, a junker in the
first place.

Since I get downvoted a lot, perhaps a clarification in order: My point is
when 2/3 of the high paying jobs in a locale get yanked, the service industry
folks that depend on people having income they can use are the first to get
screwed. Coal mining is high-paying (compared to median pay, it'd be shit by
SF standards...)

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panzagl
I think you'd be hard pressed to find a higher per-capita concentration of
non-coding 'hackers' than in Appalachia- making do and making things do what
they're not supposed to are pretty much the defining regional characteristic.
Of course that doesn't necessarily mean they'll be great developers/ software
engineers.

~~~
sirkneeland
Gotta love that old scotch-irish nature!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotch-
Irish_Americans](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotch-Irish_Americans)

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noname123
Curious what you guys think, I always thought coding is like scribing in the
13th century where a large percentage of population is illiterate and scribers
are relegated to imperial quarters to take note of the empire's history and
accounting.

However, better education system (programs to teach kids and adults coding)
and improved accessibility of writing process from carving on stone tablets to
ink on paper (better toolchains and the ubiquity of smartphones and computers)
led to mass literacy rates.

Scribers (CRUD web apps written using CGI/Java 1.5) are therefore commoditized
and become from emperor's scribes to Bartleby the clerk (CRUD using Rails and
Node).

Thus writing becomes less a lucrative profession to literature where you have
1% rockstars authors who rely on marketing and a huge popular following to
generate hits (e.g., startup's that rely on the charisma of the "founder myth"
to raise money, but have the lifecycle of a reality TV show and the whims of
the consumer taste; Friendster to Myspace to Facebook ("Zuckerburg") to
Snapchat; Napster to iTunes to Spotify to Tidal ("Jay-Z")).

Now suppose you are the 99% Bartleby the scrivener, what are you to do, other
than to say, "I prefer not to..."?

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hotgoldminer
Hello HN.. Atlantan here. Frankly I find this armchair speculation from the
west coast a bit comical. Coding as a trade is a thing at this point. Look at
the coding bootcamps that function basically as an apprenticeship/trade
school. Where does the target audience factor into it? In terms of capital, a)
money is everywhere - that's why they call it money and b) the southeast is
home to at least three top 20 banks and Atlanta is a huge payments processing
hub.

You should visit.

------
Xcelerate
I'd love to see some of the enthusiasm for science and technology that's
prevalent along the west coast spread to the south. I always find it
interesting when I read an article about San Francisco locals becoming
"annoyed" with the huge number of tech workers taking over the city. Where I
live (Knoxville), I find that most people are relatively uninterested in
discussing technology.

But I think that's changing. Chattanooga was the first city in the US to offer
gigabit internet to its residents, and the city is working hard to incentivize
tech companies to locate there — for a startup, high-quality internet and
cheap office space are hard to pass up. Also, a lot of the region's natural
beauty is attractive to programmers who are able to work remotely. Consider a
city like Asheville — hardly any tech there, but there is a great little food
scene and the city is surrounded by beautiful mountains. Research Triangle
Park in Raleigh-Durham has a fair number of tech companies, but that region is
still a little too vanilla/corporate/suburban for my liking. I think that's
changing as well though.

The biggest problem is that people are always going to locate where there
peers are and where the resources are located, and Appalachia currently has
very few tech resources. I read recently that 25% of all the world's venture
capital is located in the Bay Area. Like-minded people tend to congregate near
each other to share and debate ideas. After SF/SV, the biggest tech cities in
the US are New York, LA, Seattle, Boston, and Austin. The southern United
States still has a long way to go before they acquire a critical mass of
people who are interested in technology, and it's difficult to build momentum.
I was speaking to my uncle (who has worked at Georgia's department of economic
development), and he said that one of the big problems for technological
development in Georgia is that companies that are founded there tend to move
to California once they become successful. The question is: how do you make it
attractive for them to instead stay in Atlanta?

~~~
shas3
I think one of the 'problems' in viewing the South as a homogeneous whole is
that it is so huge and so sparsely populated. Austin, Dallas, and Atlanta (and
to an extent, Houston) are pretty tech-y, but they are all so far apart,
unlike the Eastern Seaboard, SF-SV, SoCal, or Portland-Seattle. Mid-west has
Raleigh-RTP-type pockets of science/tech in Minneapolis and Chicago, otherwise
expanse is a problem in Dakotas, Iowa, etc. too. This expanse should be less
and less of a problem as telecommuting becomes more prevalent. But geography
is still a pretty big challenge to overcome.

~~~
jacobolus
The South isn’t really sparsely populated by US standards. Here’s a choropleth
map of 2010 population density by county:
[http://ecpmlangues.u-strasbg.fr/civilization/geography/maps/...](http://ecpmlangues.u-strasbg.fr/civilization/geography/maps/US%20Population%20density,%202010.png)

~~~
shas3
Good point, there are two notable contiguous bands: Atlanta-Greenville-
Charlotte-RTP and Florida Atlantic coast. A couple of things to add: in the
south, distance between dense counties is large elsewhere- not too many
contiguous regions/clusters. Then, there's also the question: is density
_sufficient_ to create a tech hub? Density is surely a factor, but far from
sufficient.

Edit: I feel compelled to add this image from Wikipedia:
[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/51/MapofEme...](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/51/MapofEmergingUSMegaregions.png)

~~~
blahedo
The map is slightly deceptive when it comes to Virginia; here the cities are
independent of the counties that often completely surround them, and so "city
or county" is an equivalent-level government. So you see all the darkest-red
dots running up the western part of Virginia? If the population in those
cities were shared with the surrounding county and the density recalculated,
you'd get a lot more of the middle-reds you see in western NC and SC.

So the "Atlanta-Greenville-Charlotte-RTP" band that you see really continues
all the way up to DC (where it becomes even denser and turns in to the
Northeast Corridor Metroplex).

------
lingben
previous HN discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10592754](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10592754)

------
Theodores
I know plenty of people that are long-term unemployed. With some the idea of
talking about work is deeply upsetting, they just cannot bounce back, pick
themselves up, learn a new skill and get set into a new career. To them I
should be an example of how it is done - I had to change career a few years
ago, and despite being long in the tooth with no formal university education
in things like OOP, I was able to learn enough to get a programming gig and
move on from there.

I do e-commerce for my sins and I am fortunate enough to always get work. Last
time I had to pick up the phone I had 12 interviews lined up by tea time with
a couple of those being of the 'start Monday' variety. From this perspective I
am aware that, for what I do, there are more jobs than candidates.

Sometimes I watch the news and see some story about unemployment, particularly
among the younger entrants into the job market. Normally you have some talking
heads in the news article where the government gets blamed for individual
circumstances of despair and no opportunity. I then feel bemused, and wonder
why the world of work is how it is with companies like my current employers
unable to find me a front-end dev for love or money. Sure we would take zero
experience for the right candidate, although a few years of experience would
be far preferable. I truly doubt we would have more candidates even if there
were a million out of work coal miners in a five mile radius, that is what I
find odd about this article is that there were '1000 applicants'.

For all of my out-of-work friends I do try and find them some work, even if
they are not able to enter the job market properly. I can conjure up some
translation work (for those that have a different mother tongue) or some
customer service work (that requires no pre-requisite skills). I also offer to
train them up in everything I know.

But do these opportunities, even the easiest, baby-step stepping stones get
followed up on? No!!! Never!!!

Those of us in the world of work, able to get up in the mornings and able to
wear clean clothes doing as we are told working for the man at some desk all
day with a convenient pay check just do not 'get it' when it comes to
understanding the long term unemployed. To us it seems obvious - learn a new
skill, get some experience, put together a portfolio, move to a new area, but
many, many people are fundamentally depressed and excluded from the job
market. Our advice and gentle nudges falls on deaf ears. We don't understand
them and they don't understand us. Articles like this one and every news
article ever written on unemployment just has this naive view of things and
never touches on the issues of self esteem and confidence that haunt many job
seekers.

------
ddingus
Awesome. There are a ton of problems that could use software. These guys are
used to working for it, and I suspect do not need the problem to be sexy to be
worth doing.

On a more basic level, I really value people and when we can open doors for
them, the world gets a little better. Worth it. Not all of them will take the
steps, nor will all of them enjoy success.

It's not about that. It is all about the ones that do, and the number of doors
we have for people to attempt to walk through and improve.

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cozzyd
Sounds like a great idea for a movie, perhaps October.py ?

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ccallebs
I'm seeing a few people claiming this proves we're in a bubble. That we've
reached peak computer science. Why?

Maybe I'm being touchy due to my location[1] but that sounds rather arrogant.
This seems to be a more comprehensive training program than 6 week "hacker"
schools so many are fond of. The workers were even paid while being trained.
Is it because they're hillbillies?

[1] I live in southeastern Kentucky.

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rbanffy
Between writing web apps in Java and working in a coal mine, I'd be in doubt
for a moment. After that, I'd probably take the mine.

~~~
lgieron
Have you ever been inside a mine?

~~~
rbanffy
No, but, in any case, it was a joke. I would prefer writing Java code to
working in a coal mine.

Now, with PHP...

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greendata
Signs of a bubble about to collapse

~~~
acveilleux
There's a lot of unsexy dev work out there. Not the kind of change the world
startup HN is all about but the kind that made the website for your caterer or
hairdresser or an "e-commerce" website for some small business.

~~~
petra
Isn't this kind of thing fixable by configuration or installing plugins ?

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jqm
From black lung to carpal tunnels.....

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devinsnyder
once I rented a UHaul and it took the young kid like 5 minutes to type my
name. He was hunting and pecking. I don't consider programming completely
dependent on how fast people can type, but less than 10 words a minute is not
employable. For professions that are completely removed from desks I think
learning these skills at an adult age would be very challenging...

~~~
rubidium
"I think learning these skills at an adult age would be very challenging"

Anything to backup your thinking? I've seen adult hunt and peckers go to 20-30
wpm in a week or two of using no letter keyboards. That's plenty fast for
coding.

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fjdjcjjcjd
If we're not at peak computer science already, we're very close to it. Stories
like this almost seem like satire at this point. It will be interesting to see
how the companies backing this "learn to code" push fare in the coming months
with all the financial turmoil that's brewing.

~~~
totalrobe
>If we're not at peak computer science already, we're very close to it.

Is there a 'peak' reading/writing ability? Just because the majority can write
doesn't mean they can pump out award winning novels. On top of that, these
miners are learning to code, which is to computer science like grammar is to
linguistics.

~~~
fjdjcjjcjd
Peak in terms of adoption. Sure they're not experts and are only learning
fundamental skills, but it's a bizarre phenomenon nonetheless.

>Is there a 'peak' reading/writing ability?

Arguments like this don't make any sense. Computer science is no more of an
essential skill because we use computers than cellular biology is because
we're all made of cells. Why aren't we all learning cellular biology? The
miners should be learning about how their body works.

~~~
totalrobe
First, they are not learning comp science. The article states they are
learning to code HTML/PHP/JS.

Second, we do all learn biology....that's fairly standard high school and
college curriculum.

Third, I would argue that basic comp science knowledge is becoming essential
to professional success just like communication skills are. Individuals who
understand systems and communicate in functional and technical domains are in
high demand.

~~~
cjrifjcjenjz
I suppose that makes sense.

Also we all drive cars and use machinery, so we should all learn the
principles of mechanical engineering while we're at it. And all of our lives
are heavily influenced by the weather, so everyone should learn meteorology.
We also all live in homes, so high schools should provide mandatory
construction classes.

~~~
douche
_A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a
hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a
wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act
alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a
computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization
is for insects._

Robert A. Heinlein, Time Enough For Love

~~~
GFK_of_xmaspast
Insects are some of the most successful creatures on the face of the planet.

