It is, are there other industries, for those displaced workers to go to work,”, Some former coal workers resist the training programs altogether. It is the essential source of information and ideas that make sense of a world in constant transformation. “I’m trying to sound smart and sell tech,” he says. Jim Ratliff and his twin brother watch his son play football. A mine down in Harlan County was hiring. And how much could they earn? Laucher and Graham said they saw an … Now the challenge is one that’s very typical to startups: how to scale. It can happen two hours from the nearest airport, in a place where building a new road requires sawing a mountain in half, by people who have different politics, accents and hobbies than the end-users. “It touched every button of every stereotype you can put on us, that we’re not smart and can’t do things and are pitiful and all that,” Justice told me. It was certainly a long shot. “I don’t know how to break it to you …. And miners are already technical workers, machine operators, drafters, engineers. When BitSource started advertising the job, Justice was hoping for 50 applications. Rusty and Lynn soaked it all in. At a rally yesterday, Joe Biden advised a crowd in a coal mining town to learn computer programming. Sign up for our newsletter to stay informed and engaged. Retraining programs have received bipartisan support. The question is what percentage of coal miners could be taught to code to a professional level in a reasonable amount of time. Justice and his business partner M. Lynn Parrish—they’ve run Jigsaw Enterprises together for five years—have long accepted it: coal is basically over. 4:25 . You *can* teach a coal miner to code. It reads: WIRED is where tomorrow is realized. The WIRED conversation illuminates how technology is changing every aspect of our lives—from culture to business, science to design. The math was easy—he’d started college on an academic scholarship in the late 90’s, but when his wife got pregnant, he dropped out to start working. Well, a junior developer in Kentucky could make $60-$80,000 a year. Worn and torn boots sit in the locker room of a nearby coal mine. BitSource coders work on troubleshooting two of their current projects. I wanted to be a part of it.”. calls for a 'Task Force on Coal and Power Plant Communities' to reinvigorate communities that depend on mining and coal as their economic backbone. On the road to a cleaner energy future, the surrounding neck of Appalachia is looking like roadkill. And others find it too daunting to learn a complicated new skill late in life. “Windshield time,” Justice calls it. Ratliff is not one to walk away from a challenge. Rusty hands me one as I step out of the F-150 in front of my hotel. In fact, he said, they were running classes all the time, teaching teens and college grads how to program. You gotta support your family, either you were at McDonald’s, or you made $60-$70,000 a year.”. Coal piles at the base of a conveyor belt after being cleaned. In fact, Kentucky is the only rural area included in the White House’s TechHire program to train people for digital jobs. In fact, they’ve already got a name for this reinvention effort, the concept that ties everything together. “This is heartbreaking. Now this is like going into an empty stadium, that’s crumbling. Meanwhile, a third wave of the pandemic is surging. They’d driven up from Pikeville, turning onto the Mountain Parkway, cutting down through the shale mountains, and chatting like always. Researchers advise that investing in industries based in the local area can ease the transition out of mining. His backup plan was to follow strip mining work to Wyoming, but the thought of missing his three teens’ last years at home killed him. EPA clean air regulations have power plants changing over to natural gas, there’s greater regulation of strip mining, and a series of cities, universities, and state pension plans are divesting themselves from coal. We just need playing time.”, The Rusty Justice seminar concludes for today. The plan would invest in assets of mining communities, "like a rich culture, natural beauty, a proven workforce, and entrepreneurial spirit.". Even liberal media types are not amused. Trainees would be paid $15 an hour, which came from federal funds pumped through a regional economic development agency. Several months later, in April 2014, in response to a comment by Mark Zuckerberg about shifts in energy use that has led to many coal mines being closed and coal miners behind laid off, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg at the Future of Energy Summit said, "You’re not going to teach a coal miner to code. As America goes digital, its bluest collar workers are facing the toughest challenge of their lives. And then there’s the work. It was just two blocks from Justice’s house, but more importantly, right in front of the power poles carrying Pikeville’s fastest broadband internet fiber. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) recently announced $2 million in funding from the National Dislocated Workers fund, and Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) announced a fund of more than $1 million from the same fund. Outsiders have never gotten Appalachia — or else, they get the version they want: the one with the meth and Mountain Dew mouth, the incest, the painkillers, the welfare, all captured by journalists parachuting in for their regular dose of poverty porn. There were 10 newbies, and they did a quick round of introductions. Proposals to retrain coal miners … Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images. “I’m just seeing this now,” he says, before reading out the news of more mines closing and hundreds of new layoffs since Alpha, the coal company, filed for bankruptcy. “We need to do something.”, In the weeks that followed, they lined up the details. It’s not that stuff like that doesn’t exist—but if the world always insisted on zooming in on your warts, you’d be resentful, too. You’re not going to teach a coal miner to code. Code fills the screen of a BitSource coder. It’s gotta be. “We ought to try this,” he said, as Justice opened up the door. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (updated as of 1/1/21) and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement (updated as of 1/1/21) and Your California Privacy Rights. Parrish is worried even about the effect of U.S. Secretary of Labor Thomas Perez coming to shake the coders’ hands, or reporters like me coming to do stories. But, Rusty thought a potential miner-to-coder pipeline actually makes a weird kind of sense. They also learned that they were not going to be paid. In the end, they got 900. Just as much as the code, Hall says he had to teach an aptitude for screwing up. Justin Hall, blue, works with coder Adriana Abshire and others. has proposed moving the U.S. away from fossil fuels to reduce the country’s carbon footprint. They began driving about 500 miles from Chicago every weekend to teach him and others in the community how to code. The miners would have to learn or they would be fired, and if too many of them failed, so would the business. © 2020 Condé Nast. That’s why, at dawn one October morning last year, he trotted down his driveway towards a silver F-150 truck idling in the street and drove some 150 miles along the Mountain Parkway to Lexington. BitSource would like to hire a second class of coders at the beginning of the new year. Dell monitors sat on a dozen desks, murals of Appalachians who’d made it big covered the walls. Lexington tech companies couldn’t find enough. You know, make Bloomberg in his smart suit eat crow for once. “So you don’t have to teach motivation.”, Just as much as the code, Hall says he had to teach an aptitude for screwing up. That’s what they’re gonna be. Rusty and Lynn got the idea when they visited Awesome Inc, a Lexington tech incubator. Now they’re hitting the unemployment office in the thousands, signing up for help. Billyjack Buzzard enrolled in Mined Minds' program that promised to give out-of-work coal miners a new start by teaching them how to write computer code. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. They can’t go home again. It’s important they know how to fix headers. | Th, Sesame Street creates Muppets to help refugees, CDC report reveals ways Head Start child care programs have prevented COVID-19 outbreaks, Foreign students are still stranded in the United States due to the coronavirus pandemic. Ratliff stares straight ahead. Coal is to Eastern Kentucky what tech is to Silicon Valley — the most copious, best-paid work that pushes every other lever in the economy. Ratliff dialed the foreman back the next day. Michael Harrison grabs his lunchbox, the same one he used in his coal mining days. The cashiers at the family-run grocery store. According to Weigel, the comment was met with silence from the audience. On the other, Hall claims to be a descendent of “Devil Anse” Hatfield — as in those Hatfields, the ones from the bloody Hatfield-McCoy feud, with the sites where they shot at each other or were buried dotting the surrounding hollers. a mining analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence has said. One new venture in Kentucky offers a solution: teaching coal miners how to code. “I definitely did not create a cool little zombie scene with a first-person character in Unity while I was waiting.”, “Last 24, I fixed the header,” he says. He mentioned healthcare, construction, education, and tourism as promising fields. “Last 24, I went through the pattern lab demo,” says Garland Couch, the Xbox guy, an ex-mine manager draped in an oversized polo shirt. That’s the magic.”. It’s a rainy Saturday morning, and Justice wants to take me around the place. Clothes and personal belongings of coal miners are locked and hoisted to the ceiling of the locker room at one of the areas last operating coal mines. On the same day his unemployment ran out in March, Jim Ratliff walked through BitSource’s door. It’s Friday, and that means team lunch. The breakthroughs and innovations that we uncover lead to new ways of thinking, new connections, and new industries. During the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump ran on bringing coal jobs back to the United States, and Joe Biden said on December 30 that miners should learn to code, as those are the “jobs of the future.” Then, a plan for profit (Justice and Parrish didn’t want a do-gooder charity, they wanted to build a real business.). A jolly 50-something man who had sold equipment to the coal companies, and made use of his unemployment to become a Baptist minister. Ratliff brings up his son’s high school football victory the night before. Conversely, if everything worked, they would all make money, and the miners would have some of the first coding jobs in Appalachia. You bet people here have a chip on their shoulder. Let’s consider that to learn how to code, all you need is the desire to do so, a computer, and an internet connection, and a typical American household, even a financially struggling one, has all three. It’s like being at the stadium, all those people come together and they create this atmosphere? That’s when he came across Bloomberg’s latest jab. They’re not Stanford grads in hoodies, or dropouts in turtlenecks. The two kept thinking about what Such said about coding being a trade. “I think we can do this, and I didn’t want to think I left something and it became something really special. Some dropped out the first week. “We just don’t want all the notoriety to give the false illusion that we developed all the skills.”, Rusty is less cautious, and thinks they just need to keep digging, keep plowing, keep seeding. Whatever happens, the same-old isn’t going to work. Where great games were played.”, What they’re building in its place is all so fragile and new. We drive out through Pike County, down the side of a mountain on a gravel road, until we reach the 1920’s-era duplex houses of a former company coal camp called Stone. But it’s fragile, just 10 people out of thousands, and it has yet to even recover its costs, let alone make a profit. The startup is called BitSource, and the surprising thing is it’s actually working. Rusty, you see, runs a land-moving company in Eastern Kentucky, and the anti-coal movement is playing a big role in systematically closing down the industry he’s worked around all his life. When they get back to the office, Rusty Justice blazes in. But when he does — even if it’s just for a moment — it’s like remembering the gloating rich kid who stole his lunch. Some 8,000 miners have been laid off in the last four years — that’s more people than the entire population of Justice’s hometown, Pikeville. This fall, working at BitSource, he hasn’t missed a game. When you came here, you were IN something. By Jeff Donlan. Biden's campaign has proposed moving the U.S. away from fossil fuels to reduce the country’s carbon footprint. This was just patronizing. Story at a glance. All rights reserved. After all, coal was the back-end code of 200 years of industrial progress — the fuel that bent the steel for Ford cars and train tracks and skyscrapers, and much of the electricity to light them. A brainstorming session left a swirl of ideas. To revist this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories. Please Stop Telling Miners to Learn to Code. Then, three days later, Parrish pulled up at his partner’s house. Then Less, Unix, and Git. There's no doubt you're going to be able to find some former coal miners who would make good coders. But even if they’re learning new skills, the ex-miners in the room never overtly criticize their old work—not in front of me, not in front of other ex-miners, not when it’s what paid the bills and kept their region alive for so long and they gave so many years to. That’s less than miner wages, but it was better than working at the McDonald’s double-lane drive-thru downtown. Former Vice President Joe Biden suggested Monday that displaced coal miners should learn to code. Jigsaw is right there in that corrugated steel building. Most had heard the program’s radio ad. “The rest is kinda history…. And someone had to turn him around at the end of every row. There was a surface miner. And could they actually sit in a chair for eight hours a day? Not all programming is esoteric and difficult, and programming skills apply in job areas all over the planet, not just silicon valley, and not just dedicated programming jobs. “Anybody who can go down 3,000 feet in a mine can sure as hell learn to program as well,” Biden said at a New Hampshire event Monday.. So the owners of Jigsaw, a Pikeville, KY, excavation and engineering company, … but no.”. “I didn’t like the work, I liked the people.”, This summer, Ratliff got a call from the same foreman who laid him off. Much of the instruction came from videos at Lynda.com. 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