“We had eleven slots and we figured we’d get maybe 50 applicants,” he says, “if we were lucky.” They got 950. Justice put out the radio ads and a print ad. Would any miners actually want to be coders, though?

(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. They found an office in a former Coca-Cola bottling plant in Pikeville that, crucially, was right next to a high-speed internet line. 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’d find some talented out-of-work miners, train them and start doing contracts for anyone who needed an app or website built. “Coal miners are really technology workers that get dirty.” He and Parrish decided to bring coding to Pikeville. Justice and his business partner Lynn Parrish tossed around concepts, from alternative energy plays such as wind farms and solar farms and “even hog farms”, Justice jokes.Ĭoal miners already work like programmers: they sit in one place all day long, patiently running high-tech equipment and solving problems 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. It had to be in a sector that was growing, not collapsing. Justice realised he needed to build a completely new business in Pikeville. “We all saw a downturn coming, but we did not foresee the complete collapse of the economy,” he told me. But he was shaken by the vertiginous decline of coal. 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. The job offer was the brainchild of Rusty Justice.

Only eight years later that number had dropped to 6,500. In 2008, Kentucky had more than 17,000 coal miners.

Coders clive thompson