In 2019, Clive Thompson — longtime contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and columnist for Wired — published Coders, a close, human portrait of the people who build the software running our lives. Buried in its final chapter is a story that deserves far more attention than it usually gets: laid-off Kentucky coal miners retrained as professional programmers in a shuttered Coca-Cola bottling plant, built on a bet that coding could become the next generation’s stable, blue-collar trade, with no computer science degree required.
That bet collided almost immediately with a public fight: NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg declared flatly that you can’t teach a coal miner to code, while Mark Zuckerberg insisted you could. Thompson’s reporting shows both were partly right — coding did open up as a route to the middle class, but it also split into castes, with boot-camp grads and career-changers doing lower-paid “pink-collar” front-end work while an elite, credentialed tier captures the real money in machine learning and infrastructure.
In this episode, we go deep on that single argument and push it into the present. Now that AI coding tools can generate exactly the kind of templated, entry-level code that was supposed to be the on-ramp for people like the Kentucky miners, is the blue-collar coding promise still alive, or did AI just kick away the bottom rung of the ladder? Thompson helps us find out.
