isnt this what bill clintont was telling them 30 years ago? or they could follow the lead of many in the oil and gas industry who are transitioning over to jobs in renewable energy.
I don't know if coding but coal miners certainly should be looking to do another job. Coal mining is a horrible job and a dead end technology. Even during the times when miners were earning decent money many were still dying of black lung and mine accidents.
You’re in a dying industry. Pick yourself up by the bootstraps and learn a new skill. Sales is effort, and good sales people make wayyyyy more than coal miners.
I don't think these people care about these jobs as much as they just care about getting a paycheck. Government retraining programs are a universal failure and a waste of money. We'd be better off as a society just paying all the coal folks to stay home.
I think the point is that you can't save every job - some jobs are going to disappear. You can't save manufacturing jobs when even in China they are disappearing. The answer may not be programmers, but they need to find another skill or retire. And this is why its so important that everyone has basic things such as education, food, healthcare, and housing. If you can get all those things, people wouldn't have to fear losing their jobs and it would give them time to transition and relearn a new trade.
Plenty of other jobs opportunity but coal miners are going to accept or be happy going from a 70k job to something that paid half of that. Beg coder gets same paycheck. Coder just might mean another high paying job.
Some 900 applied for coding jobs with a local startup in 2015, so it seems some did learn. But of course, it’s one thing to learn the basics of programming (which you can get a job with that skill but no company is going to hire 50 years old beginner over a new college grad or a teen that just completed a summer of coding boot camp) and be a pro that companies will compete for. This was one of those industries that went dead almost overnight. And no, it’s not so much due to regulation but the boom in natural gas. Even if it wanted to, the gov can't react that fast to a free market that wipes out an industry that quickly.
"My grandpa and my father made something similar to 70K a year with 8th grade educations . . . could but houses and raise large families on one check. . . I demand I have the same opportunity to not learn and make more than college graduates!!" - Coal Miners Rocket River
Plenty of small and mid-size companies actually are forgoing a lot of requirements that used to be pretty steel-clad. Like degrees in a CS program or bootcamp. Self-taught is gaining traction -- that being said pay will be bottom of the barrel (relative to tech salaries) but they'll be making enough to make a living. Ageism exists, sure, and entry-level jobs are really tough, but if you break in and are semi-competent you can progress to a decent salary within 2-5 years. That being said, programming/development is not a skill anyone can just pick up and thrive in and I definitely am not suggesting anyone try to make a career change because it is very tough in the beginning and while the barrier to entry is relatively low (no certificates, you're starting to not really need a bootcamp anymore -- it'll definitely help, and some places don't even look for degrees in general anymore) you still have to compete with in incredibly tough entry-level market with tons of talented candidates. "Learn how to code" is and always has been an ignorant red herring to actually solving the core problem of the transition from manufacturing to service/IT industries and a lot of that is being silently bankrolled by tech companies that want to depress the market averages similar to how a lot of people in the industry complain about H1B as well as in the grander scheme of things politicians that do not want to actually tackle the hard problem. This is why UBI gained popularity -- although the 'robots / ML took er jerbs' is just an oversimplification.
More or less. They wrap it around tradition and blue collar pride but not sure they really like their lives before things dried up (even more), Follow the booze...and desperation
