Coding as a Trade, Not a Calling

Definition

Where programming has been mythologized as the domain of pedigreed prodigies (Chapter 6's "10X" rock stars), it can also be taught as a skilled trade: a bounded, learnable set of practices that people without a computer-science degree — or any degree — can acquire on the job, the way earlier generations learned electrical work or machine maintenance. The shift matters because it changes who is allowed to imagine themselves as a coder, and which economic populations get access to the field's wages.

In the Book

Chapter 11 tells the story of Bit Source, a coding bootcamp founded in Pikeville, Kentucky by former coal-industry businessmen Rusty Justice and Lynn Parrish after the region's coal jobs collapsed (Kentucky's coal workforce fell from over 17,000 in 2008 to 6,500 by 2016). A tech-incubator director told Justice that local firms couldn't find enough programmers and that "anyone smart and committed could learn programming on the job, just like with any skilled trade" — no computer science degree required. Justice recognized that miners already possessed the underlying aptitude: "Coal miners are really technology workers that get dirty," used to "robotics," "fluid dynamics and hydraulics," and disciplined, methodical work.

Bit Source advertised eleven coding trainee slots and received 950 applications, evidence against the assumption that this population lacked interest or aptitude. Laid-off miners like Garland Couch and William Stevens went through intensive HTML/CSS/JavaScript training and were shipping real client code — a city council website, an opioid-addiction support app — within months, despite having to unlearn mining's "moving slowly and meticulously" ethic for code's tolerance of fast iteration and fixable mistakes. Thompson frames this as a generational shift Anil Dash calls "the Blue-collar Coder": coding maturing from a rare, mythologized calling into ordinary, high-demand middle-class work.

Why It Matters

This offers a counter-model to credentialism: when a skill is genuinely teachable through structured, intensive training rather than gated by a specific degree pedigree, entire populations excluded by the pedigree requirement can be shown capable, given the incentive and the training pipeline. It is exportable to any field debating whether its entry barrier reflects a true skill requirement or an inherited, unnecessary credentialing habit.