The Coders of Kentucky | Hacker News Reader

The Coders of Kentucky

nytimes.com

78 pointsdekayed62 comments

I'm from KY. This article is great, but in focusing on these coding bootcamp graduates, it misses the much larger picture of just how much brain drain occurs for actual CS graduates (who, to be fair, are much less likely to be from Eastern KY).

Right now they're taking millions in gov. money to train a small amount of people... but Kentucky graduates many more people with degrees in CS every year, by about an order of magnitude. There are basically no "good" software jobs in the state, so a lot of the good graduates leave to go work at Amazons and Googles. Training local talent is good, but you have to have more jobs than Interapt, OpenText, UPS, and GE to cultivate a local tech industry.

What I think Kentucky should do is focus on brining remote workers back, for now - once there's a strong local talent pool, then you can begin courting businesses, not vice versa. I know a guy who went back to care for parents while keeping his $200k+ salary, which makes you pretty rich in Kentucky terms, and also provides a huge tax benefit to the state. I know lots of people at big west coast tech companies that would like to take their west coast salaries back home, but as is, I don't think any of us would go back to work at Interapt.

yes. there's a similar problem in Alaska. We do have jobs but not nearly enough compared to the quantity of developers/graduates up here. It drives down wages and most developers end up leaving. It took me years to find my first development job while being stuck in call centers and tech support roles for 4 years.

This is exactly how I feel about it. I came to the Bay Area for compensation closer to the value I provide. I stay because few other places offer the same combination of opportunity, compensation, and diversity. I'd take a 10% to 20% pay cut to live closer to family in a less expensive area, but where they live (a Midwestern city) every single one of those three things is strictly worse.

Is compensation really strictly less with a 20% pay cut? I'm from the midwest and I have a hard time wrapping my head around the compensation differences. Google-able "cost of living" calculators give me an 80k range for my midwest city salary, that works out to 35-62% cut.

The cost of living adjustment doesn't include things like savings rate and is at best an apples-and-oranges comparison for housing. In my target city I could easily buy a house 50% larger than I currently rent: but the schools, parks and such would be worse. Think of it like social classes: to get access to equivalent schools and other county provided services (parks, libraries) I'd have to live a level (or two) above my Bay Area lifestyle, negating a lot of the base COLA adjustment. Also my savings rate would plummet: to save the same amount at typical incomes in my target city I'd have to increase my 401k rate by a factor of 1.5 or more, use more of my post-tax income for diversification, etc.

Former Kentuckian here. I moved out to California shortly after college, partly due to the exact reasons you described. There's simply no parallel job-wise to west coast tech jobs in Kentucky, including my hometown of Louisville.

I know several fellow southerners and midwesterners who are working at large tech firms out here. No matter how much we may love where we come from, there's simply no realistic avenue for us to go back.

Places like Kentucky already have huge tech talent pools, but the workers are currently in exile in the coasts. I'd imagine if these states focused more on bringing tech firms to their state, they'd see a lot of that tech talent return home.

Very true. UK, U of L, and many other schools in the state produce solid devs. And you're right a lot of the better grads leave for better jobs. But I wouldn't agree that there are no "good" jobs here. The salary is lower, but you probably come out ahead in CoL terms. There have been some startups doing well recently in Lexington and from what I understand Louisville is only doing better. The place I work, Badger Technologies, is doing some pretty awesome things and has some open positions.

This article in the Herald Leader explains and give some numbers to what you're saying https://www.kentucky.com/news/business/article181564581.html Supposedly some of the reason the group was pushed by some larger employers in the area that were hearing potential employees were turning down offers because if the job didn't turn out well in the long run there weren't many alternatives.

For somebody with student loans, how can Kentucky entice them to stay? In a way it makes more sense to do the retraining Interapt does. Picking up the older people who are less likely to want to move.

I think in the mid-long run, remote workers will scramble to get out of KY. State income tax is 6%, and if you live/work in Louisville you get hit with another 2.2%. I GTFO when I realized that my state/local income tax in KY were was than enough to rent a comfortable apartment in Seattle.

Obviously I get hit with dozen different taxes in Seattle, but I'm also able to reap the benefits like decent public transit and well maintained roads/sidewalks. I seriously struggle to understand where my taxes went in KY. It's a pretty abysmal situation.

I've been working in Alaska a as consultant for the past 12 years and I make good money here at an interesting and fulfilling job with a team I mesh well with. I've also got a BS in CS.

There are lots of talented programmers in places you wouldn't expect. Many of us have no desire to move to a giant megalopolis where we'd have a higher cost of living, more taxes, a two hour commute, and a poor culture fit in our community.

The only way I'd consider a job working for a tech company down in America is if I could work remote around 75% of the time. It'd also have to be really interesting. There's no way I'd give up summers on the boat with my dad or unparalleled back country snowboarding in the winter.

If you're looking to outsource some work to AK I can list a few resources that will help:

http://akdevalliance.com

and two popular consulting companies up here:

https://www.resourcedata.com/

http://www.wostmann.com/

Disclaimer: I did not list my consulting company.

I think the author is making a mistake by assuming the biggest potential benefit would be the coders taking jobs with "tech companies" in Kentucky. Coders working outside of technology companies can still provide significant added value. Smaller, non-tech companies frequently see enormous productivity benefits by building simple building CRUD applications with a small amount of custom business logic.

Absolutely. One can imagine a more level playing field when things like attractive websites, SEO, and efficient internal data management are more available to small businesses.

> Smaller, non-tech companies frequently see enormous productivity benefits by building simple building CRUD applications with a small amount of custom business logic.

The problem is convincing these smaller companies of that fact. Many of these smaller businesses are owned by people who are deeply suspicious of technology, often with good reason. They've been burned by slick salespeople who've promised the moon and have saddled them with software that they don't know how to understand or maintain which now has vital financial or customer data.

As a result, many smaller companies (such as sole proprietorships) don't understand how far along software has come, and the role that software plays in allowing larger companies to squeeze them on margins.

I think the most important line of the article is:

"On its first run in 2016, Interapt had 800 applicants, accepted 50 and graduated 35."

Any strategy that posits IT and programming "insourcing" as a solution for the troubles of Middle America is going to have to have a strategy for the 750/800 people who don't have the chops to become a software engineer.

765 assuming the graduates all found jobs.

Isn't it more likely that they had a class limit of 50 and not that the 750 didn't have the chops to become a software engineer?

At some point we should wonder what other strategies Silicon Valley has. The fact that coders are encouraged to work remotely is attractive to sustain these areas of the USA, but it hampers the formation of centres of specialisation and exchange with other fields: either these graduates stay and work remotely, disconnected from both local industry[1] and the tech hubs, or they move away and worsen the unemployment problem they were supposed to combat.

[1] Not to mention that coding websites and apps doesn't exactly make you an integral part of the economic tissue of Hueysville, KY, as opposed to the much-maligned coal jobs.

Yeah, that's a huge issue. The ability for the local talent to share their expertise with each other is important too. I agree, but there are solutions to the problem. More meetups and groups have been started in the area, Lexington, and some more rural areas too.

I hope programs like this work and continue to help out my fellow Kentuckians. Beyond coal, factory, or retail jobs the opportunities for work in eastern kentucky and appalachia in general is bleak.

This is basically the life I lead, minus the boot camp. I spent five years in central Virginia instead, to get my career to the point where I could get a good remote job.

I live in rural Arkansas, and there are basically no tech jobs here. My salary is much less than it’d be in LA (where my employer is located), but is still something like four times the median family income here.

I feel like I have the best of both worlds, and wish I could help others here make it in our industry - but who wants to hire remote junior devs?

It's an inspiring story about jobs in middle America. But can places like Kentucky really compete with outsourcing hubs like India or Eastern Europe?

I think it comes down to access to education. Coastal US businesses would be happy to "outsource" work to these areas if these skillsets were widely available there. Perhaps, trade schools and coding bootcamps like the one in this article will be enough to bring these jobs.

It’s a complicated story.

I work and recruit people in a a market that is in the 50-75 range. It’s definately feasible for a larger company to hire/develop, but it’s difficult for a smaller company due to the smaller number of “fungible” mid career people.

The thing that’s so offensive about the outsourcing hubs is that for bigger companies they just suppress wages with a constant flow of cheap labor with no rights.

By eliminating job competition at the entry level, they are putting a wet blanket on the domestic market.

That's one thing I think is missing from the immigration debate. If we're worried about immigrants driving down wages it'd, perhaps somewhat counter-intuitively, make a lot of sense to make it easier for people on work visas to leave their jobs without losing status. Instead we see people going after family visas. The rhetoric doesn't match the policy (well, some of the rhetoric comes from an uglier place and does match the policy, but I mean the stuff about jobs).

Off the top of my head there are a few huge advantages to outsourcing to the US:

Far less of a communication barrier when you all speak English as your primary language. (communication breakdown has got to be the biggest reason outsourcing fails.)

No huge time zone delta. This means you don't usually have to wait 24 hours before you get a reply to your email.

Easier to fly the developers over for meetings or to show them around your facilities.

Because people from KY can freely move to CA/NY/WA and people from India can't, it's a lot harder to exploit the people in Kentucky to work for wages that are significantly less than what they're worth.

If Kentucky was a good outsourcing hub, then the good developers would eventually just leave to find better jobs, unless the local jobs paid almost as well, in which case it doesn't make much sense to continue outsourcing to Kentucky! Borders prevent Indians and Eastern Europeans from doing this

I came away from this article feeling cautiously optimistic. As the article noted, they had 800 applicants, accepted 50, and graduated 35. It's great that those 35 got jobs, but what do you do with those 750 people who couldn't get in? Do you train them in something else that requires a little bit of tech skills, such as CNC machining?

I don't know what the exact cause is, but I got the impression the reason 50 were admitted was that there was a limit to the scale of the program, not that everyone else was unqualified. The article mentioned they are admitting 90 the next year and were continuing to expand.

That's true, I forgot to say that I'm happy that they're going to expand.

I've been a firm believer for a long time that a lot of IT jobs, including software development, but also all sorts of support and operations tasks, should be treated more like a trade, with more formalized apprenticeship tracks and training. There's value in a traditional college degree, but there's still a lot of practical skills you can only learn on the job. But there's also a lot of potential talent in the field that's not being harnessed because of the lack of a more structured pathway into these sorts of jobs. This sounds like an interesting program, but it's a shame it takes federal grants and private companies to provide something that a robust state education system ought to be covering in partnership with the corporations who would benefit from having these trained workers.

Edit: I know it is anecdata but I do want to point out that there are counterexamples under specific circumstances (read when creating CRUD apps).

I just got into the job market (I studied for 8 years, 4 degrees, now graduated for good, did some serious jobs on the side).

So far I disagree. I have had 5 freelance gigs: two in iOS (couple of years ago), one as a web dev coding instructor for a year (1 to 2 years ago), one in React frontend (1.5 years ago) and now 1 as a full-stack/dev-ops/semi 'data scientist' person.

Computer science allows me to rise above the difficulties that I'm facing now since all I'm building are glorified CRUD apps. I am looking for a company that takes software engineering more seriously than this. Because of building glorified CRUD apps and some knowledge of soft skills + some git knowledge is all there is, then a computer science degree is overkill.

For comparison: I made iphone apps during courses in my CS degree, I disabled viruses, fiddled around with concolic execution, created a computer graphics engine, created a compiler(ish) an operating system(ish), learned UML, some software architecture.

How is this not enough for CRUD apps?

I’ll be curious to see what happens to the people who do have advanced degrees if a lot of the “traditional” jobs that require them today suddenly don’t. Will they be the next generation of PHB’s? Or will they just keep working the same jobs that they used to do? Will their pay go down as they do? Or will an entirely new sort of job emerge?

Great article. Bipartisan win!

When people work together (across partisan, economic, social, etc.) divides, everybody benefits.

Kudos to everyone involved in this one.

Seems plausible to me. Doesn't Joey Hess live in KY or TN?

I've been wondering for a while now, seeing constant asks for charity to Appalachia, if they could just get more remote work there.

Software development is a semi engineering, semi math/quantitative profession. Very little of current US primary/middle, and high school education is dedicated that. A few boot camps are not going to solve the fundamental skills mismatch issues....

No, it’s not. Software engineering is about creating and communicating logical structures, which is closer to writing philosophy papers than to cranking quadratic equations or knowing the integrals of trigonometric functions. Some high school math may be incidentally useful in the analysis of algorithmic complexity, but the structural correspondence between math and programming doesn’t show up until math transitions from quantitative (numeric and symbolic computation) to qualitative (proofs) well after the end of the high school curriculum.

Good proof methods are symbolic computations. Hoare logic and the predicate calculus are the two major examples I know of. In fact in my personal favorite formalism, a proof is actually rather a lot like an equation[1].

It's an observable reality that most "pure" mathematical proofs are rather less rigorous than the best CS work, simply because peer reviewers are rather more lenient than computing machines.

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD13xx/E...

> "Trump for President.” (Kentucky went 63 percent for him.)

What does that have to do with the article? I really despise the media bias and overtly political tone that seeps its way into everything. I live in the South.

The real story should be the economy is booming, opportunities are omnipresent, and the American dream of working hard and progressing your way up the financial ladder of success is obtainable for everybody. Kudos for going out taking the class, learning to code, and taking control of your future and economic success.

> What does that have to do with the article?

I'm from this area of Kentucky and the fact that it went for Trump has everything to do with the subject.

I'm 36 now, and coal has been in decline for almost my entire life. Yet the area cannot move beyond it because they keep waiting for 'coal to come back'. Politicians come and lie, and say they will return them to the glory days of coal. Trump came and told the most brazen, unrealistic lies of any previous politician. And so the state went for Trump.

Coal isn't coming back, and Appalachia cannot accept this. Until they can accept this and move on, Appalachia will always be impoverished. Sure the rest of the country is having economic boom times, but Trump made Kentucky worse.

Mentioned in the article: http://time.com/4793315/donald-trump-budget-appalachian-regi...

I had already forgotten about the Trump administration's attempt to slash the ARC. That would have been a huge economic hit to Appalachia.

> Trump made Kentucky worse

Unemployment rates and total laborforce are at lows and highs respectively since 2000 in Kentucky as of the latest bls data (look at the graph since 2000). Nonfarm wage and salary metrics are at all time record highs in Kentucky. The data suggests contrary, you may have a promising career at the NYT.

https://www.bls.gov/eag/eag.ky.htm

There's something you don't understand about Kentucky: The huge economic divide between Eastern Kentucky (Appalachia) and the rest of the state. Appalachia clings to being a coal based economy, and it's been failing them for decades now. According to the state Government, as of August 2018 the unemployment rate for Eastern Kentucky is much higher than the national average at 7.8%: https://kystats.ky.gov/kylmi/index/

Taking the state wide average masks how bad things are in Appalachia. Eastern Kentucky cannot catch up to the rest of the state until politicians stop lying to them and lay bare the sobering reality: Coal isn't coming back.

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