How this Kentucky startup turned coal miners into coders

In 2014, Garland Couch was just another laid-off coal-mine worker in Kentucky.

An orange-goateed 41-year-old at the time, he lived not far from Pikeville, a town of 7,000 nestled in the winding green mountains of east Kentucky. For 15 years he’d worked doing preventative maintenance on coal-mining equipment, toiling in coal like his father and his grandfather before him. Coal formed his life. “When you work with a mine, those folks become your family,” he tells me.

But in the early 2010s, the coal industry went into a steep decline, as fracking produced a boom in cheap natural gas, renewables became more and more viable, and the federal government enacted regulations designed to move the country away from coal. In 2008, Kentucky had more than 17,000 coal miners. Only eight years later, that number had dropped to 6,500. The region was increasingly dotted with huge stacks of coal that didn’t have any market. And now Couch was realizing he didn’t have many good options. He knew of an industrial maintenance job in Louisville, but it was too far to commute to, and he didn’t relish the idea of uprooting his wife and daughter for a job that itself might not last long.

While he pondered those alternatives, he heard a curious ad on the radio.

“Have you been laid off from a job in the mining industry?” it asked. “If you are a logic-based thinker willing to work and learn new things, we have a career opportunity for you. Bit Source is bringing the computer coding revolution to Eastern Kentucky.”

What the heck? Someone was offering coding jobs — in Pikeville?

The job offer was the brainchild of Rusty Justice. A salt-and-pepper 55-year-old at the time, he, too, had worked in mining his whole life, running his father’s coal-shipping business and a land-formation company. But he was shaken by the vertiginous decline of coal. “We all saw a downturn coming, but we did not foresee the complete collapse of the economy,” he told me.

Justice realized he needed to build a completely new business in Pikeville. It had to be in a sector that was growing, not collapsing. And it had to offer jobs that paid well: Kentucky coal jobs paid over $82,000 on average, so well that each job supported several others in local grocery stores, bars, and car dealerships. The region needed tent-pole salaries. Justice and his business partner Lynn Parrish tossed around concepts, from alternative-energy plays like wind farms and solar farms; “even hog farms,” Justice jokes.

Then one day in 2013, during their research, they visited a tech incubator in Lexington, a few hours away. It looked like your standard airy, sun-soaked Silicon Valley start-up space, replete with huge leather sofas and a Ping-Pong table; coders pecked away at tables. The head of the incubator told them that local tech firms couldn’t find enough local programmers to hire. There wasn’t enough talent. The jobs were good, paying up to $80K a year.

That’s great money, Justice said, but he figured you’d need a computer science degree. Nope, said the incubator head. Anyone smart and committed could learn programming on the job, just like with any skilled trade.

Now that got Justice’s attention. He knew that mining workers were intelligent, trainable, and frankly already steeped in technology. “We’re perceived by people that we’re not smart, that we’re hillbillies,” he tells me. But coal miners already work like programmers: They sit in one place all day long, patiently running high-tech equipment and solving problems. “It’s a highly technological business,” he says. “You have this image of a guy who has a pickax and lunch bucket. But they use robotics, they understand fluid dynamics and hydraulics.

“Coal miners are really technology workers that get dirty.”

He and Parrish decided to bring coding to Pikeville. They’d find some talented out-of-work miners, train them, and start doing contracts for anyone who needed an app or website built. Soon they’d found a coder who was willing to train incoming staff; they’d lined up federal funds to help pay the workers while they were training. They found an office in a former Coca-Cola bottling plant in Pikeville that, crucially, was right next to a high-speed internet line. (In Pikeville, as in much of Appalachia, broadband wiring is scarce to nonexistent.) They dubbed the company “Bit Source” as a play on the digital bit and the bitumen of mining.

Would any miners actually want to be coders, though? Justice put out the radio ads and a print ad. “We had eleven slots, and we figured we’d get maybe fifty applicants,” he says, “if we were lucky.”

They got 950. Stereotypes about hillbillies are, it turns out, precisely that; local residents were practically tripping over each other to compete for a job in software. In fact, the response was so huge Justice’s trainer built a database so they could sort through all the applications. They wound up creating a preliminary test to weed out all but the best, a mix of math and psychological questions like: Would you rather overhaul an engine or give a presentation? That narrowed the pool to 50, so they did another round of testing; finally, they interviewed the top 20.

Garland Couch was 1 of the 11 who passed the tests and the interview, and got hired. Like the other 10, he frankly didn’t see mining rebounding; it was time to try something new. On his first day he walked through the Bit Source doors marked with the slogan “A new day, a new way”; the walls were adorned with murals of local historical figures, like John CC Mayo, the investor who helped bring coal min- ing to the region. “Learn as if you are going to live forever, live as if you are going to die tomorrow,” read a slogan on another wall. “What have I got myself into?” Couch asked himself.

“From now on, you stop thinking of yourselves as unemployed coal workers,” Justice told them. “You’re technology workers.” Among the new hires were a mine safety inspector, an underground miner, and a college-educated mechanic who’d fixed conveyer belts in the mines.

They’d all get internship wages of $15 per hour while training, then a raise after they were actually doing work. Justice and his partner were investing their own money in the salaries, and it’d be up to them to scare up enough work to keep the team employed.

The miners began intense, daylong cram sessions on HTML, CSS, and eventually JavaScript and mobile-app languages.

“It was kind of like trying to drink from a firehouse,” recalls William Stevens. Mining was physically exhausting, but “this was mentally draining, the most mentally intense work that I’ve ever done.” Stevens had showed up at Bit Source after being laid off from a surface mine and hustling up a new mining job in a town three hours away. He left his wife and three daughters in Pikeville and would sleep in his car while off at his job, returning only on the weekends. He was, he says, insanely motivated to make coding work — he couldn’t handle that sort of brutal commute, chasing vanishing coal jobs around the state. The miners were so intent on grasping code that Couch didn’t learn his seatmate’s last name for weeks.

Slowly, the work began to make sense. They’d end each week by making a small project with what they’d learned — a simple web page at first, then an interactive one, then ones that stored data in databases. Justice was right: They were rapid, attentive learners. One hard part was adjusting to the faster, looser ethics of development. In mining, moving slowly and meticulously was key. If you made a single mistake something could literally blow up, endangering lives and costing a company millions. With code, in contrast, the point was to iterate quickly and fix things as you went. Mistakes were fine; they were a given.

Within months, they were actually shipping code. Much of it was, at first, simple — a website for Pikeville’s city council, sites for crane and earthmoving companies. But then it got steadily more complex, including an app that let patients redeem vouchers at farmers markets, an augmented-reality app, and — in a bit of pro bono work deeply relevant to Kentucky — an app to help communities struggling with opioid addiction.

Three years in, Justice’s investment was close to breaking even. The hard part is sales, he says, getting clients to look past their coastal snobbery about hiring a bunch of hillbillies — a word Justice uses proudly — with thick Appalachian accents. But his programmers were now full-fledged developers, hobnobbing with MIT computer science professors at meetups and impressing Linux experts with their meticulously documented code. “They didn’t have any bad habits to un- learn,” Justice notes. Stevens had discovered he loved front-end design, tweaking the CSS and fonts on a site for hours. “That whole experience of when you see someone’s face light up, that’s just awesome,” he gushes.

And Justice had become a minor celebrity in the world of economic development. He was fielding calls from all over the world, with civic leaders asking how they, too, could “do a Bit Source.” It wasn’t easy to give advice. You had to be pushed to the edge, confronted with a totally collapsing economy.

“It was motivation through starvation,” he notes. “My daddy used to say, Life ain’t fair, so wear a helmet.”

But he’s convinced that Bit Source is, in its own small way, a glimpse of the next phase of coding. The first mass wave were the personal-computer pioneers, the nerdy kids who started with Commodore 64s or early HTML and parlayed it into millions. But now coding is mature. It’s become more of a ticket to the middle class; something that the great mass of people can see as a route to reasonably stable, enjoyable employment. It’s like, in other words, pretty much what mining used to be around Kentucky.

“These are blue-collar workers,” Justice says of his programmers. “And this is blue-collar work.”

Part of what made Rusty Justice decide to bring coding to rural Kentucky? He was told it wasn’t possible, by a rich guy from New York City.

In 2011, Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire who was then mayor of New York, donated $50 million to the Sierra Club to help pay for “Beyond Coal,” a campaign designed to agitate for policy that promoted the rise of renewables and the end of coal-burning energy plants. That itself annoyed Justice, since he’s a big defender of coal as a font of usefully cheap energy, and lucrative Kentucky jobs.

But in 2014, Bloomberg went even further by actively dismissing the idea that miners could learn to make software.

“You’re not going to teach a coal miner to code,” Bloomberg said at the Bloomberg New Energy Finance summit. “Mark Zuckerberg says you can teach them to code and everything will be great. I don’t know how to break it to you . . . but no.”

Clive Thompson is the author of Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World, from which this article is adapted.