
Former miners out to put Kentucky on the tech map - kiyanwang
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/apr/21/tech-industry-coding-kentucky-hillbillies
======
fuball63
I'm from the region, and work remotely as a coder. Some of these really
backwoods areas are very beautiful and tranquil, and when combined with the
affordability, I think it is a great place to code. A lot of local politicians
and economic developers are grasping to coal/lumber/manufacturing, but I think
there is opportunity to build small tech hubs for young people burnt out on
expensive, crowded, and distracting cities. Invest in a few bars, coffee
shops, low rent office spaces, and most importantly, broadband, and I don't
think it would be hard to convince coders and entrepreneurs to come.

EDIT: additional thought: there are also great outdoor recreation
opportunities that is one of my favorite things about living here (hiking,
mountain biking, rafting)

~~~
gm-conspiracy
Good luck with the broadband, especially in the current political climate of
the FCC.

I believe that having affordable, high-speed internet (where you are allowed
to actually host a server), would revitalize Appalachia.

Between the shuddered coal-plants that can be repurposed as data-centers, and
rails-to-trails right-of-ways that can be used for fiber runs, there is plenty
of opportunity.

Good luck convincing the politicians, though.

~~~
Muuuchem
I am confused, are you guys suggesting that some cities and towns in Kentucky
and other areas within the US lack the same broadband infastructure that I
enjoy access to in small-town Mississippi?

~~~
jbawgs
I live on the most populous hilltop in Hyden KY. Our only ISP caps at 1mb, and
its not terribly reliable. Satellite is of course an option, but the expense
is prohibitive if you use a lot of data.

~~~
protomyth
Wow, that just sucks. North Dakota has pretty good rural broadband on the
whole. I get the feeling its because we seem to have multiple providers
everywhere and the rural electric cooperatives and local telephone companies
have stepped up with some serious fiber.

Technically, you should have benefited from some of the legislation passed,
but after looking at it, it was pretty impossible to access.

------
Animats
A huge amount of Government money has gone into infrastructure for Pikeville,
KY. There was the Pikeville Cut-Through, finished in 1987, where the U.S. Army
Corps of Engineers _moved the river_ to a more convenient location.[1] That
also got the town a superhighway connection with two interchanges. There's the
East Kentucky Expo Center [2], which has only two events, wrestling and a beer
fest, scheduled for the rest of the year. There's the University of Pikeville,
with 2,300 students. There's the Pikeville Medical Center, an 11-story
hospital with a 10-story parking garage and 3,200 employees. There's a large,
modern high school with a swimming pool. It has 2,300 students, so it must be
drawing from a larger area than the town. There's a downtown multistory car
park connected by a sky bridge to part of the University of Pikeville.

All this in a town of only 7,000 people.

Population is increasing slowly; it's not a dying town. The town itself never
had heavy industry; the mines were elsewhere. It's a service center for
central Appalachia. Population within 20 miles is 110,000. The town's problem
is that the area it services is losing population.

If you wanted to locate there, the local mall has about 30,000 square feet
available. No coffee shop in the mall, but the mall has a supermarket-sized
Texas Roadhouse. Eat more beef. AT&T offers 45mbps Internet in most of the
downtown area.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pikeville_Cut-
Through](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pikeville_Cut-Through) [2]
[http://eastkyexpo.com/AllEvents.html](http://eastkyexpo.com/AllEvents.html)

~~~
jbawgs
Its the only actual town for miles in any direction. All those other dots on
the map nearby are incorporated hilltops. If they have a gas station with a
Hunt Bros pizza franchise, its a town.

That said, our leaders spend any aid money we get on 'tourism' which never
pays off, but they don't learn.

~~~
Animats
Check out the tourism site, "Pikeville, Kentucky's Outdoor Family
Playground".[1] There's zip lining, kayaking, and a riding stable. There's
also a web site for downtown Pikesville.[2]. Boosterism is alive and well in
Pikesville. It's a pretty little town. But it's just not going to draw
tourists from far away.

There are bigger places in much worse shape. Youngstown, OH, population down
to about 60,000. It was once a bigger industrial city. When the steel industry
shut down, it lost its purpose. Plenty of industrial space is available if you
have some use for it. Ohio and Pennsylvania have too many cities like that:
Akron, OH; Erie, PA, Bethlehem, PA. Pittsburgh came back from losing its steel
industry. Cleveland didn't.

[1] [http://www.visitpikeville.com/](http://www.visitpikeville.com/) [2]
[http://www.pikevillemainstreet.com/](http://www.pikevillemainstreet.com/)

~~~
bsder
> Pittsburgh came back from losing its steel industry.

Not really. It's still down population almost 10% from 2000.

Losing Westinghouse was a gigantic loss--and it didn't need to happen.
Westinghouse should have been a source for tech talent during the Dot Com boom
to combine with CMU and Pitt students. Instead Pittsburgh was a technology
desert in that same time (I remember trying to find WiFi hotspots there in
2000-2002 and people staring at me like I was from Mars).

------
mbarq
While bridging the diversity tech gap, this is another gap that needs to be
addressed; the tech-displaced gap (which is the same tbh, and is only going to
get wider as time goes on).

Don't want to get too political here, but this "middle-america" vs. "liberal
minorities" class war is nothing but a fabrication of the media and the elites
to get these two disenfranchised groups to battle amongst themselves- they're
the same side of coin.

At 25 I went back to school for programming and it was hard and I only was
able to do it because of the support of my parents. For a 55 y/o coal miner
with a family to support, rent to pay, etc. I can't even begin to imagine how
they would go about "learning to code"\- as if they don't have these
responsibilities.

Though children are the future, these people are the present, and if we don't
find ways to help them (whether it's free community college, bootcamps, or
internship placements), they're going to get desperate (e.g. vote Trump), and
the future is going to pay dearly for it.

~~~
cylinder
It's capital vs labor. It's cute how employee professionals think they are in
some sort of ruling class (at least according to the media).

------
liamondrop
As someone who grew up in Appalachia and has since moved to NYC and built a
career in tech, it hurts me to read stories like these and think about how
many good people are getting left behind, due to factors largely out of their
control. Sure, folks could uproot and abandon the area, but that solution is
no less tragic. In terms of natural beauty, few places can rival. With a bit
of enlightenment about what opportunities already exist in affordable tech
education, some meaningful investment in infrastructure, and some
entrepreneurs willing to get their hands dirty, we could turn this region
around. Silicon Holler has a ring to it.

~~~
idlewords
Investment in infrastructure would especially help, because it would create
jobs that could then flow into the local economy. West Virginia is one of the
most beautiful parts of America, and could have a booming tourist industry.
Travel through there and you see one deindustrialized town after another where
a few million dollars of investment would transform the local economy.

------
superpope99
Time and time again I keep coming back to the same conclusion - anyone who has
the desire can learn to code. I would say that 95% of people have enough
innate logic to write code, they just need to be taught to express it
formally.

~~~
Moshe_Silnorin
>in 2015, then watched as more than 900 applications rolled in. From this
pool, they chose 11 former miners who scored highest on a coding aptitude
test. Two years later, in an old Coca-Cola factory by the Big Sandy river,
nine men and one woman remain

They gave people an IQ test and took the top percentile of a group that, due
to their interest, was already slightly selected for intellectual ability.
This is not proof that anyone can program.

Did you even read the article? It is in accordance with the unfortunate fact
that programming is a high IQ job that the majority of people are not capable
of becoming proficient in. Though for many here this is not unfortunate, as it
is the reason wages remain high despite a lack of licensure.

Humans differ in cognitive ability and most of this difference is genetic.
Modern psychometrics and common sence agree with this. We cannot build a
better word on false but pleasing ideological assumptions.

~~~
gkilmain
I missed the IQ test part. All I read was coding aptitude test, whatever the
hell that is.

Sure we're all different and maybe 95% is high but its at least 50%. One out
of every two people I meet I am confident they could become proficient at
programming given a solid learning environment.

~~~
Moshe_Silnorin
A programming aptitude test is just an IQ test with another name.

>One out of every two people I meet I am confident they could become
proficient at programming given a solid learning environment.

That's quite possible, even if what I say is true. People tend to mix with
people on their own intellectual level. The people you talk to enough to get a
good estimate of their intelligence are unlikely to be randomly selected from
the population.

If you believe average people can become good programmers, this implies you
could make billions converting 100 IQ people into programmers and then
undercutting everyone else. I predict you will fail, unless you figure out a
way to vastly deskill the art of programming.

~~~
brudgers
An alternative way to prevent deskilling programming is to make the tools
required to program such that learning to use them becomes mostly a matter of
oral tradition rather than accessible. This might (or might not) be happening.

For example, the evolution of Javascript from a low status programming
language to a high status one has paralleled a shift from a stable core
language and a well documented API to the DOM to a combinatorial explosion of
changing frameworks and complex development toolchains. Learning some
combination gulp and babel and redux and angular(2) and webgl and ten other
things is more a matter of access to people who will patiently answer
questions than something a person can learn without working on a team.

~~~
Godel_unicode
I think your learning style is leaking through here. While not a JavaScript
expert (who designs a language with whitespace/formatting not being a first
class concern?) I had no trouble picking it up from the docs and random blog
posts.

I'm a learn-by-doing type though, YMMV.

~~~
brudgers
I agree people's mileage varies. My gut is that programming languages have
generally evolved in ways that widen that variation and that the explosion in
the number of people who are coding due to increased access masks much of that
change.

------
EternalData
It's interesting to have local politics geared towards attracting talented
people, but there's precious little that can be done if talent is
fractionalized at a national level through the concentration of urban bubbles
to immigration policies that stem inflows of talented people...

Talent is distributed unevenly, but I don't think a series of competing local
lobbies will change that. I've always thought that all of the local ecosystems
for which talent flows unevenly should think seriously about banding together
and working on policies that 1) increase overall talent availability 2)
distribute its spread more evenly -- 1 would involve working to get Congress
to create incentives for entrepreneurs/high-skilled workers of all kinds to
come to America in the first place, for example, while 2 might be a
combination of infrastructure/tax policies.

------
jbawgs
I live in eastern KY and there are a few programs like this one. In Hazard KY,
another coal-bust town, I was accepted to a program to train force.com
developers. Hold your scoffs please, we've learned a lot in the last few
months, including using JS.

The broadband struggle is real. I worry that at some point we'll still need to
relocate.

~~~
Muuuchem
Is broadband expensive or bad or unavailable? What about satellite internet? I
live in Mississippi and broadband internet is affordable and available
throughout the state and has been for years so I expected Kentucky to have the
same or similar. Some places miles away from the nearest town in MS definitely
don't have broadband.

~~~
jbawgs
1mb 'broadband' service, offered as DSL, runs about 90$ per month, and that's
our only ISP. One could get satellite that's faster, but satellite internet
also has low data caps, and the cost scales out of proportion. The terrain
derails reliable wireless services, and the low population density rules it
out anyway - folk are pretty far apart.

~~~
protomyth
Who is your electric company?

~~~
jbawgs
Our electric company is AEP, but our ISP is TDS. They're awful.

~~~
jbawgs
Hadn't ever considered it, didn't know the power companies were crossing over
like that. I'll definitely investigate further, thanks!

------
jacques_chester
We were lucky to host some visiting Bitsourcers in NYC. They were fantastic.

They told us the same thing: coal miners have to _think_. You do the right
thing, the right way, _every_ time, or somebody could die.

The stakes are lower for tech projects, but they brought the care with them.

~~~
jbawgs
I haven't met any of their devs, but when our program began the owners came to
speak to us. They're good people.

A lot of times it seems people take it for granted that 'skilled/intelligent'
and 'rural' are mutually exclusive.

~~~
dsacco
Did you mean to say "not mutually exclusive"?

~~~
jbawgs
Nope! They aren't mutually exclusive, of course, but a lot of folk believe
that they are, hence my comment.

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andrewem
Looking at that picture of the huge empty highway and ramps, I can't help but
think that the $15 million needed to connect to fiber optic backbone could
have been found if so much hadn't been wasted on that road building. The same
is true in many economically shrinking areas of the US, where fewer and fewer
people get more and more miles of roads. (Also, think of how much of their
newly created 400 acres of flat land was wasted on those ramps.)

~~~
onlyrealcuzzo
I swear to pizza, in my hometown they are removing TWO ENTIRE MOUNTAINS
because rocks keep slipping on to ONE of the South-bound lanes. Last I heard,
the estimated cost is over $50M. Only 50k people live in the entire metro
area. Population is halving about every generation on top of that. Best part
is, this route runs alongside a river. On the other side of that river is an
identical route. They could literally just shut down the road and not even
need to build any new bridges...

------
yawaramin
That's interesting, this is the second miner-to-coder success story I'm seeing
in the news recently. There's also Mined Minds in PA:
[http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/couple-teaches-laid-
off-...](http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/couple-teaches-laid-off-coal-
miners-pa-code/)

Coincidence or indicative of people from declining industries switching to
tech?

------
jasongrout
Are there good groups in Louisville, KY, for adults wanting to learn how to do
software development (or more generally, enter the tech industry)? Does anyone
know of any good online resources for adults along these lines?

I know about a number of resources for kids learning to code, but those are
maybe not appropriate for a motivated adult wanting to investigate switching
careers.

~~~
brett40324
Between Louisville, Lexington, and Cincinnati there is a large community of
developers, tech startups, meetup groups, and a job market that is wide open
for good talent. Meetups and classes in Louisville are definitely a google
search away. Also there's awesomeinc.org in Lexington. If you want to learn to
code, try some online courses first. If you dont hate it, get out and meet
other developers, look into courses available. Expose yourself to enough
concepts so you can make an informed decision about what you would prefer to
actually do as a developer.

------
didibus
I'm curious, what was the actions put in place by the federal government that
they blame for killing their coal industry?

~~~
jbawgs
In general, they blame environmental regulations rather than market forces.
The area is full of urban legends about how the natural gas power plants are
vastly inferior to coal fired plants, but they're being upheld by a cabal of
evil liberals who want to destroy the industry because ???

