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)
There are dozens of cities in the U.S. that want to be the next hub for young tech entrepreneurs, and most of them have more financial options than Kentucky, which is among the most dependent state budgets on federal dollars. Additionally, young people are socially and politically liberal, while KY voters overwhelmingly elected staunchly anti-LGBT representatives and were strongly in support of Trump.
I think it would be pretty hard to convince even the most disillusioned Bay Area or NYC software developer to move to rural Kentucky over e.g. Pittsburg or Portland.
There isn't anywhere else I'd rather be. Before I joined a program in Hazard like the one mentioned in the article, I was in construction for 15 years, and I've been a lot of places. Appalachia is the best place though. We could also stand to have an influx of bright young people with a broader view.
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.
I'd move if I knew that the locals wouldn't make my life hard for being transgender and not the typical Christian (I'm a Christian Gnostic, so I'm way out there in terms of my faith). But if anything living in my home state of Kansas has taught me is that no matter how much you reach out and try to show kindness folks will inevitably stay focused on the foreign qualities you bring in their midst.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Programming is similar to chess in that it has a high branching factor. Each potential path towards a desired end state leads to other potential paths and excludes others.
Good programmers are adept at being able to visualize complex trees and with experience to be able to quickly prune (exclude) suboptimal paths.
This is a pretty limited skill set and is closely correlated with spatial reasoning. Studies have shown that that skill is somewhat malleable through training but still follows a bell curve. Better training could double the number of people who could potentially succeed in stem careers but that is still far from everybody being able to code.
And the effect of training is to largely move people from the middle of the curve slightly to one side and not moving somebody from the middle to the edge of from one edge to the other. That means while you can make some people programmers you can't make anyone excellent programmers.
On a side note my experience is that people without strong spatial reasoning skills tend to find shortcuts early on that help them cope and those coping methods can eventually become strengths in their own right. For example they become adept at memorizing procedures (medicine) or start at the end state and work backwards (project management). To someone who relies on strong spatial reasoning abilities and never developed these techniques these people's abilities can seem like they are able to manage complex trees with speed (memorizing) or extremely deep trees with ease (project management).
>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.
I don't think programming is science I think it's more like plumbing. You're dealing with a complicated system made out of the most simple parts. Anyone can learn how to setup or fix these systems if they get what the basic parts do.
There's not really much science in non-academic computer science. We're just builders who make, fix, and break things.
But 95% of people can't lay bricks precisely enough or at the speed a bricklaying company is going to hire them. And for sure 95% of people aren't interested in laying bricks.
Is it worth teaching 95% of people to code? I don't think it is. Most people don't have to lay bricks to live in house.
Personally I'm of the opinion that a lot of programming learning difficulties come from the teachers and methodology of teaching programming.
Though it's all antidotal from
Going through different college courses that teach both programming and contactor/ladder logic. The programming classes had something like 40% learn rates, while the ladder logic classes everyone eventually got it. And with chances of going out to the field utterly normal people have been able change our contactor/ladder logic to make things work and/or fix issues.
My view is that most programming work is more of a skilled trade, like being an electrician or plumber, rather than a profession, like law or civil engineering. Doing something useful doesn't take a whole lot of formal education, doing clean good work requires lots of experience plus good teaching in industry best practices, and there are a lot of opportunities for self-employment.
The studies I've seen are a few decades old, and I think programming has become easier since.
But the result back then was that even among young talented people who entered programming classes, a large percentage (40%-70%, don't remember) just couldn't do it.
The biggest "tell" was understanding pointers (in C). A lot of people just got stuck on that and couldn't move forward.
I mean most people can make an alert box. Most people can't design and build a decent sized application. I have never met a good programmer not in the top 25% or so of the intelligence range. So at best that limits us to 1/4 people.
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.
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.
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.
> You do the right thing, the right way, every time, or somebody could die.
This stood out for me in the article. I moved to coding after a few years as an aerospace engineer. In the aerospace world you don't want to make mistakes either, so I know how jarring it can be to move to an industry that operates on the motto "just ship it and we'll patch it later, maybe".
I hope they can bring their thoughtfulness to their code and develop a reputation for shipping solid product.
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.)
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...
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.
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.
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 ???
[+] [-] fuball63|9 years ago|reply
EDIT: additional thought: there are also great outdoor recreation opportunities that is one of my favorite things about living here (hiking, mountain biking, rafting)
[+] [-] 467568985476|9 years ago|reply
I think it would be pretty hard to convince even the most disillusioned Bay Area or NYC software developer to move to rural Kentucky over e.g. Pittsburg or Portland.
[+] [-] kyleblarson|9 years ago|reply
And for those who don't know, the correct pronunciation of Pikeville is 'packvul'. (I grew up in the area)
[+] [-] jbawgs|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gm-conspiracy|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] norea-armozel|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|9 years ago|reply
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 [2] http://eastkyexpo.com/AllEvents.html
[+] [-] jbawgs|9 years ago|reply
That said, our leaders spend any aid money we get on 'tourism' which never pays off, but they don't learn.
[+] [-] mbarq|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] liamondrop|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] idlewords|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] superpope99|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slv77|9 years ago|reply
Good programmers are adept at being able to visualize complex trees and with experience to be able to quickly prune (exclude) suboptimal paths.
This is a pretty limited skill set and is closely correlated with spatial reasoning. Studies have shown that that skill is somewhat malleable through training but still follows a bell curve. Better training could double the number of people who could potentially succeed in stem careers but that is still far from everybody being able to code.
And the effect of training is to largely move people from the middle of the curve slightly to one side and not moving somebody from the middle to the edge of from one edge to the other. That means while you can make some people programmers you can't make anyone excellent programmers.
On a side note my experience is that people without strong spatial reasoning skills tend to find shortcuts early on that help them cope and those coping methods can eventually become strengths in their own right. For example they become adept at memorizing procedures (medicine) or start at the end state and work backwards (project management). To someone who relies on strong spatial reasoning abilities and never developed these techniques these people's abilities can seem like they are able to manage complex trees with speed (memorizing) or extremely deep trees with ease (project management).
[+] [-] Moshe_Silnorin|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gravypod|9 years ago|reply
There's not really much science in non-academic computer science. We're just builders who make, fix, and break things.
Edit: added do
[+] [-] mythrwy|9 years ago|reply
But 95% of people can't lay bricks precisely enough or at the speed a bricklaying company is going to hire them. And for sure 95% of people aren't interested in laying bricks.
Is it worth teaching 95% of people to code? I don't think it is. Most people don't have to lay bricks to live in house.
[+] [-] lithos|9 years ago|reply
Though it's all antidotal from Going through different college courses that teach both programming and contactor/ladder logic. The programming classes had something like 40% learn rates, while the ladder logic classes everyone eventually got it. And with chances of going out to the field utterly normal people have been able change our contactor/ladder logic to make things work and/or fix issues.
[+] [-] azernik|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unclebucknasty|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] BurningFrog|9 years ago|reply
But the result back then was that even among young talented people who entered programming classes, a large percentage (40%-70%, don't remember) just couldn't do it.
The biggest "tell" was understanding pointers (in C). A lot of people just got stuck on that and couldn't move forward.
[+] [-] brianwawok|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gravypod|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] EternalData|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
The broadband struggle is real. I worry that at some point we'll still need to relocate.
[+] [-] Muuuchem|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacques_chester|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] teleclimber|9 years ago|reply
This stood out for me in the article. I moved to coding after a few years as an aerospace engineer. In the aerospace world you don't want to make mistakes either, so I know how jarring it can be to move to an industry that operates on the motto "just ship it and we'll patch it later, maybe".
I hope they can bring their thoughtfulness to their code and develop a reputation for shipping solid product.
[+] [-] jbawgs|9 years ago|reply
A lot of times it seems people take it for granted that 'skilled/intelligent' and 'rural' are mutually exclusive.
[+] [-] unknown|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] andrewem|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onlyrealcuzzo|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jbawgs|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yawaramin|9 years ago|reply
Coincidence or indicative of people from declining industries switching to tech?
[+] [-] jasongrout|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kingkongjaffa|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] didibus|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jbawgs|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Brandonknight|9 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] Brandonknight|9 years ago|reply
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