With some coal company stocks crashing 95 percent in value over the last five years, I would say it’s way, way worse. Meanwhile, a third wave of the pandemic is surging. And although tech scenes have cropped up in cities in the middle of the country — Boulder, Austin, Indianapolis — things still lag in truly rural areas. They move some of the earth back into place and grow grass to stabilize the fresh soil and make it look mountain-ish again. Although the industry added 4,500 jobs from 2016 to 2018, U.S. coal production decreased by 10 percent in 2019 and jobs are at risk. But when he does — even if it’s just for a moment — it’s like remembering the gloating rich kid who stole his lunch. So, as Parrish dropped Rusty off at his house, “We said, huh, what do you think?’. We just need playing time.”, The Rusty Justice seminar concludes for today. The miners would have to learn or they would be fired, and if too many of them failed, so would the business. He, Parrish, and Hall want to fill up their buildings, create an incubator for entrepreneurs, a makerspace for craftsmen, and, someday, if they play their cards incredibly well, a bonafide Pikeville tech scene. BitSource is bringing the computer coding revolution to Eastern Kentucky.”. Jigsaw is right there in that corrugated steel building. A former Coca-Cola bottling plant is the new home to BitSource. Meet the Company Teaching Coal Miners To Code. But they’re not nostalgic either. “I think we can do this, and I didn’t want to think I left something and it became something really special. Bit Source is proving that coal miners can, indeed, learn how to code, and do it well. Coding is the most in-demand job in today’s economy, Such told them. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Josh Benton, the deputy secretary of the Education and Workforce Development Cabinet in mining-heavy Kentucky, told Ohio Valley ReSource that the biggest problem is whether or not workers actually have other jobs based out of where they live. The question is what percentage of coal miners could be taught to code to a professional level in a reasonable amount of time. The federal government has pumped nearly $23 million into the region in the last two years to diversify the post-coal economy and retrain miners into jobs like installing broadband fiber. “People are going to have to get laid off,” Andrew Cosgrove, a mining analyst for Bloomberg Intelligence has said. But Jonathan … On Wall Street, it’s a big enough problem that the New York Stock Exchange threatened former industrial titans with delisting. It’s Friday, and that means team lunch. I wanted to be a part of it.”. Ex- miners whose jobs disappeared in the downturn are learning to build websites and apps in the heart of Appalachia at a startup called BitSource. Justice compares the disruption to the way Uber’s turning the cab industry inside out. Then Less, Unix, and Git. Cause this was a hub of activity, it had an energy all of its own. “They believe they can do it. Tim Loh. Then came an email with a BitSource job offer. 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. 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. Whatever happens, the same-old isn’t going to work. This week it’s El Azul Grande, a sit-down Mexican restaurant named in honor of the University of Kentucky’s rabid sports fans. Kentucky has been spending federal funds to train customer service work-from-homers, place out-of-work miners into other jobs, and a coding camp for kids. Ratliff dialed the foreman back the next day. Via New York Magazine, Please Stop Telling Miners To Learn To Code: God only knows where Biden got the idea that coal mining consists of throwing the stuff into a furnace. Retraining programs have received bipartisan support. Rusty takes a seat, checks Twitter, and then calls out for everyone’s attention. Although they are often touted as a solution, retraining programs have a questionable record of success. You go home and your head is tired. At first Ratliff struggled to keep up. Meet the Company Teaching Coal Miners To Code - Duration: 4:25. 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. By the end of the first week, all 10 coders had built an HTML page — be it a tribute to Stevie Ray Vaughan or University of Kentucky basketball. Shawn — the former reporter with a Colonel Sanders-esque beard — critiques FX’s Justified, which is set in nearby Harlan county. There go 70 percent of Justice’s construction jobs. “I think that job training keeps being promoted because it solves a political problem both for elected officials and for employers, but it doesn’t do anything for the economics,”. Dell monitors sat on a dozen desks, murals of Appalachians who’d made it big covered the walls. The two had looked for a solution in several potential industries over the last two years: wind farms, fish farms, farm farms. I think we’re proficient, but we’re not yet efficient. The coders swivel back to their computers, and Michael announces weekend plans to no one in particular: “Looks like I better learn C#.”. Code fills the screen of a BitSource coder. “Fail fast and iterate” is not the going ethos of mining, where a wrong move means the wrong part of a mountain gets blown off and your ass gets chewed. Yesterday, I published a story on Backchannel called “Canary in the Code Mine” that shows, quite literally, you can teach a coal miner to code. Waking up at 3:30 in the morning to go work in the strip mines “wide open, just as hard as you could get it” for 10 to 12 hours a day for the last 14 years will do that to you. There's no doubt you're going to be able to find some former coal miners who would make good coders. Conversely, if everything worked, they would all make money, and the miners would have some of the first coding jobs in Appalachia. They find the toothless guy, the trailers with shotguns racked up on the wall and the yard strewn with diapers and beer cans, and they film some dude saying weird shit in a backcountry accent that needs subtitles to comprehend, they give it an ominous title like “A Hidden America: Children of the Mountains,” and they leave. A mine down in Harlan County was hiring. “You’re not going to teach a coal miner to code.” So said former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Wednesday at the Bloomberg New Energy Finance Summit, a … J. Paul Gorman, one of Appalachia’s newest coders. “We ought to try this,” he said, as Justice opened up the door. Just eight months in, the miners are now building webpages and apps and closing contracts. Intrigued, Justice and Parrish piled back into the F-150. This fall, working at BitSource, he hasn’t missed a game. He’d go to the end of the row and stop. Laucher and Graham said they saw an … the biggest problem is whether or not workers actually have other jobs based out of where they live. 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. Hall is happy with all the updates, whether they’re serious or not. There go the machinery vendors and mechanics. “No, I don’t miss this at all,” Harrison, the former mechanic, told me while showing me a video of his old underground worksite on YouTube. By Kevin Collier. You would never guess it by looking at him. That’s when he came across Bloomberg’s latest jab. Hall was the one who scrapped together open-sourced curriculum for BitSource. Former Vice President Joe Biden suggested Monday that displaced coal miners should learn to code. Were they technical thinkers? The place looked like a coding shop: a “binary canary” logo looked over the stairs, old coal sacks and tools decorated the lobby. Appalachia’s newest startup founder might be fueled by endless reserves of renewable Rusty Justice energy. You know, make Bloomberg in his smart suit eat crow for once. The optimism surrounding the place doesn’t make the sight of Eastern Kentucky hurt any less. It’s a skill.”. I wanted to make sure I’d exhausted every revenue source.” Still, he got a face-to-face interview. has proposed moving the U.S. away from fossil fuels to reduce the country’s carbon footprint. It’s just as important they know he’s speaking emoji when he says “sad face” in a sentence, and that they crack up at programmer memes. “I am blue collar,” Justice tells me later. Say what you will about the long-term environmental effects (Justice, for one, is very pro-coal) but the impact on the area’s one-source economy has been brutal. Then he asked Ratliff if BitSource was hiring. The plan would invest in assets of mining communities, "like a rich culture, natural beauty, a proven workforce, and entrepreneurial spirit.". Lynn and Rusty even had the perfect space already: A vacant, block-long Coca-Cola bottling plant that they’d bought in the spring. Sign up for our newsletter to stay informed and engaged. It’s gotta be. They began driving about 500 miles from Chicago every weekend to teach him and others in the community how to code. 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. They’re all going to need to be fluent in C#. Rusty Justice doesn’t think about Michael Bloomberg very often. 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. Wired may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. It was time to go and prove Bloomberg wrong. You *can* teach a coal miner to code. Getting down to this final group of candidates had been tough. That day, Rusty wanted to get them jazzed about his new idea: A hydroseeding app. The group settles around a long table, and bow their heads as Hall says grace, before digging into their enchiladas and Californian burritos. It started three years ago when Rusty Justice and M. Lynn Parrish, the owners of a Pikeville, Kentucky excavation and engineering company called Jigsaw, got tired of watching out-of-work coal miners struggling to survive. Worn and torn boots sit in the locker room of a nearby coal mine. “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. It is, are there other industries, for those displaced workers to go to work,” he said. © 2020 Condé Nast. The coders are getting it — they’re building websites, closing contracts. And, like any good startup, they kicked it off by making a T-shirt. With coal mining at a 35-year low, coal regions have been struggling with job losses and stagnant local economies. 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.” They’d driven up from Pikeville, turning onto the Mountain Parkway, cutting down through the shale mountains, and chatting like always. At a rally yesterday, Joe Biden advised a crowd in a coal mining town to learn computer programming. “Mark Zuckerberg says you teach them to code and everything will be great,” said Bloomberg. “ we said, ” he said, as Parrish dropped Rusty off at his partner ’ a. 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