They Were Promised Coding Jobs in Appalachia. Now They Say It Was a Fraud. - Sensationalist Headlines

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/12/us/mined-minds-west-virginia-coding.html BECKLEY, W.Va. — On a spring day in 2017, Stephanie Frame sat down in her hilltop home deep in the mountain hollows to record a video. She began with the litany of local decline: the vanishing jobs in the coal mines, the shuttering stores, the school that closed down. During one stretch of unemployment for her coal miner husband, the two had resorted to selling ramps, ginseng and yellowroot that they had dug up in the forest. But this video, aimed at her neighbors, was an announcement: Redemption was here. A nonprofit called Mined Minds, promising to teach West Virginians how to write computer code and then get them good-paying jobs, was looking for recruits. “I wholeheartedly believe, and will always believe,” Ms. Frame said to the camera, “that God has sent Mined Minds to us to save us from what could have been a very bleak future.” She had every reason to believe. Joe Manchin III, her Democratic senator, had invited the group to come into the state. The National Guard hired it to teach at its military-style academy. County commissioners arranged space rent free. National news outlets gave glowing coverage. Many West Virginians like Ms. Frame signed up for Mined Minds, quitting their jobs or dropping out of school for the prized prospect of a stable and lucrative career. But the revival never came. Almost none of those who signed up for Mined Minds are working in programming now. They described Mined Minds as an erratic operation, where guarantees suddenly evaporated and firings seemed inevitable, leaving people to start over again at the bottom rungs of the wage jobs they had left behind. Over two dozen former students in West Virginia are pursuing a lawsuit, arguing that Mined Minds was a fraud. Out of the 10 or so people who made it to the final weeks of Ms. Frame’s class in Beckley, only one formally graduated. He is now delivering takeout.

It's only going to get worse as America does not give the slightest fuck about the unemployed and is actively ignoring automation.

Good to also know how we straight up lie about the employment numbers, and that its actually WAY higher than politicians want you to believe But that's ok, just pretend the unemployed don't exist AT ALL

Reading the article feels more like incompetence rather than being a straight up scam, but then again, how come this got public funds and no one checked the quality of the teachers / the company itself?

This program was specifically designed with the intention of taking people from dying jobs and moving them to higher paying, more stable job. The depressing news is that the program seems to have utterly failed and left said people in a worse position. This only fuels the people grasping to their coal jobs to stay where they are than risk moving.

The UK does a similar thing actually, you only count as unemployed if you are receiving benefits for being so (Jobseeker Allowance, basically). You may have heard that they are making it increasingly hard to get and then stay on said benefits, causing lots of people to drop out of it and thus conveniently disappear from our unemployment statistics.

the concept of retraining someone to be a coder, probably the most competitive field at this time, is ridiculous. unless the program includes a guaranteed position somewhere at the end of it you're looking at maybe a handful of people successfully transferring from any job into one in the computer science field and that's being very optimistic.

No, no it was not. The program is typical of and identical to vulture programs you can find in the trucking and transport maintenance fields (considering where those fields are headed, no comment) and housing fields and good ol ITT, remember ITT? Pepperidge farm remembers ITT. The term nonprofit in no way shape or form entails luminous nun-like angels empowering downtrodden good peoples into digital wizards. The program never had enough staff and never had a competent up to date curriculum, ever, nor any means or plan of doing so. You can offer the argument it wasn't a scam, but that argument isn't very well supported. Maybe do some reading before conflating intentions and PR with results and testimony from participants.

betting the heads of this non-profit cut themselves a fat paycheck.

What's really sad is the mindset behind it, really. People can learn to program and do awesome things with it without ever paying a cent. There's volumes of knowledge is available out there in very easy-to-digest forms. The website itself looks like hot fresh garbage, by the way: http://www.minedminds.org/ Dunno what they were trying to do here.

Sounds like a scam to me, set up a quick sham program aimed at desperate people to pocket their money whilst leaving them with nothing.

Unemployment figures are generally correct. The issue is under employment, aka 3 hours of casual work per week and being considered "employed"

The west has been pointed ignoring this since the 80s and has no infrastructure at all for dealing with it, unlike most other western countries.

ya I have no idea why they aren't trying to move them to things like CNC machinists, the coursework is only about a year and they pay about 50k/year. those jobs are massively competitive in terms of pay as well and basically any manufacturer in this country is desperate for someone with a HAAS certification and those skills more closely match the skills these rust belt people have

Not heard that before, do you have a link where I can read more? The best I can so far is this, but it seems vague and just defers to the international labour organisation.

US's unemployment calculation does not count workers who stop looking for work after 4 weeks

https://www4.shu.ac.uk/research/cresr/sites/shu.ac.uk/files/real-level-of-unemployment-2012.pdf One report on it, this one is from 2012 but as I understand it this kind of statistical shuffling is still ongoing. https://www.businessinsider.com/unemployment-in-the-uk-is-now-so-low-its-in-danger-of-exposing-the-lie-used-to-create-the-numbers-2017-7?r=US&IR=T

that and not everyone is cut out for the job i keep hearing about a shortage of coders around here but i've heard so much shit about the field (frequent burnouts, spaghetti code, shit pay, retarded suits and their absurd demands etc) that i doubt i'd last too long if i even managed to land a job in that field, let alone learn how to write anything beyond a simple hello world program

The more research I do into this now the more it seems like using unemployment rate to prove any conclusion is pointless. If you removed all of the fudging, you'd end up with a ridiculous unemployment rate. People who are studying, people who have other economic means, homemakers, those whose skills are no longer applicable etc. But with the fudging you end up excluding those people who can't find work but want to work. It seems to detract from actually debating real issues, like zero-hour contracts or job losses in manufacturing. Because it's so generalized and vague it can be used by both ends of the political spectrum to say anything.

What creative destruction myth are you on about?

The idea that capitalism results in a constantly changing economic system, where newer more profitable ideas overtake unprofitable ones. Essentially arguing that companies failing is a good thing. It'd be pretty silly to claim it's a myth, where the real debate is whether the process is beneficial or bad. I'd say if anything there's not enough companies going out of business, with some companies being "too big to fail".

not sure if that's exactly what they meant but coal jobs have been on the decline since the 1920s, not the 90s not the 80s, the 1920s. its only now that we've reached the absolute end of the scale because as a product, coal has like 3 acceptable uses anymore, for thermal, for the production of carbon products, and for the production of steel, none of which are really profitable. it used to be used in hundreds of ways but pretty much all of those more profitable ways were not great and the actual costs for coal have long been ignored from the miners pensions which were passed off to US taxpayers, to the land costs subsidized by mining on federal land well below market value due to 1800s era laws, to the disposal of coal ash and tailings which should be a toxic waste but isn't, to the cost of putting all that sulphur and carbon in the air, none of which the operators have had to actually pay

I mean, I guess its nice to have a name attached to something.

The idea of getting people from no experience to professional programmer levels in less than two years is absolutely laughable. That's not how it works. Why didn't this startup target literally any other job opening, like trade skills?

Because this is Appalachia; Mining is a trade skill. In addition, these areas get dick all in funding for economic growth and development and/or infrastructure repair. There are very few jobs period in rural America besides wasting away at Walmart or Amazon, or working the mines and getting a decent wage. I went to Clarkson University, I drove by these dying towns every year. There's nothing, not even hope of escape because they're so poor they can't leave. Trade Skill training is exactly what the Obama Administration did and it had every little impact because many of the people trained left entirely because the training was usually involving windmills which Appalachia is just shit for.

You need good programmers to evaluate how good someone is at it. Good programmers usually work in well-paid private industry jobs, not in government or administration.

All countries stop counting unemployed as part of the unemployment rate if they stop searching for jobs within a certain period of time. Otherwise if we counted everybody, every country would have an absurdly high unemployment rate between the young, the old, and the early retired (or other special circumstances). Its not a conspiracy, its a way for economists to filter through otherwise unwieldy data into something that can help regulate policy.

"Otherwise if we counted everybody, every country would have an absurdly high unemployment rate" Yeah that's the point. It's not economists that don't speak publically doing it that's the problem, its politicians and the media who run with this narrative and label it incorrectly, without further context, that's where the issue stands. These people are effectively invisible to the statistics and the media. Economists can do whatever they want, I really don't care. But we should label the current 4% stat as discounting the other xx%. The big reason this is an issue is that it makes social policies and nets far, far harder to argue. It's very much important for that argument that we understand how serious the issue is, of people who can't find work. People who can't work because they're too old, young or retired, those are not so much "Unemployed" as they are "unemployable", which is radically different than "Can't find work at all, stopped looking".

The problem is that we don't have a way to differentiate between the two at the moment. If we could, you best be sure economists would jump on that information like rabid dogs. Every few months you can see articles on Reuters and other financial outlets that mention this "Can't find work at all, stopped looking" demographic and how economists lamented they couldn't get an accurate metric of them, usually around when the fed looks at interest rates (since changes in that closely coincide with the strength of the economy in general). Two years ago the unemployment rate rose quite a bit, contrary to expectations and predictions, but economists were excited because it likely meant that demographic started looking for jobs again as the economy started looking better. Its not that there is a conspiracy to 'hide' these people, but we just have no way to show them specifically in the first place. People who are willing to work but have given up trying to find opportunities are a significantly smaller portion of the population than the young and old who simply don't intend to work in the first place.

And both of those are separate from "got fired, already burnt out and depressed from overwork, fucking gave up but too cowardly to kms" unemployable, which is an issue that requires different approaches and solutions than "just create more job openings for people".