Mined Minds has maintained that they never represented to any students, Frame and Cook included, that they would be paid for attending training.

“I definitely — specifically told them there wouldn’t be payment from Mined Minds, but we did put a couple of different options in front of them,” Laucher said in the deposition.

What Laucher did say is that the nonprofit had looked for government-sponsored opportunities to provide students with stipends as they went through the training period. In the deposition excerpts provided by the lawyers, she mentioned collecting the Social Security information of people in Frame and Cook’s class for the purposes of providing the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources with a list of people who might need financial assistance. Referring to Frame and Cook, however, she said they “did not have any interest in receiving any kind of financial help throughout the program.”

Yet New and Taylor said other former students they’ve spoken with told them the exact opposite — that they went into Mined Minds’ classes thinking they would receive stipends.

Furthermore, Laucher still counted Frame and Cook as successful graduates despite the fact that both dropped out of the class: Cook because he went back to school, and Frame because she became the manager of a Dollar Store. Referring to Frame specifically, Laucher said in the deposition that “the logic and problem solving skills that came with Mined Minds training” made her “more employable at a higher level” — even though that employment was not in the tech industry.

Laucher also reiterated that all Mined Minds graduates find a job, either as a contractor-apprentice with Mined Minds or as a salaried employee with GPdL, the for-profit company affiliated with the nonprofit.

Moore said this feature of the training program is also something of a weakness. “When that job is over, you don’t get another,” he said in an email. “I asked them to help me find another job using the skills I learned while in their program, and literally said a job anywhere in the United States, and I was told, ‘You should start your own company.’ But they didn’t teach me how to hunt down and price jobs.”

Billyjack Buzzard had a similar experience. A former coal miner, Buzzard enrolled in a Mined Minds class in June 2017 in Clendenin. In December 2017, he was hired by Mined Minds as a contractor making an hourly wage, and then, in June 2018, he was hired full-time as a salaried employee. Shortly thereafter, he started working one-on-one with a client as a consulting developer. Buzzard said he believed the boot camp training he received was as good as a four-year education in computer science, especially after Mined Minds told him they would sooner hire a boot camp graduate than they would someone with a college degree.

In the media, Buzzard was held up as a success story, an example of the precise demographic Mined Minds said they wanted to reach: the unemployed coal miner who needed to retrain for work in a different field. Yet during a phone interview at the end of March, Buzzard was irritated. Three and a half weeks earlier, without warning, he said, Mined Minds laid him off. According to Buzzard, Mined Minds claimed he was billing a client for time worked, but wasn’t actually working on the client’s project. Buzzard said the discrepancy is easy to see: He wasn’t inputting any hours into QuickBooks because he was a salaried employee.

Buzzard is still unemployed in the tech field, and his inability to find another job is indicative of a larger problem with coding, and the boot camps that teach it, being hailed as the cure-all for displaced blue-collar workers. Job markets are local, and assuming that anyone can get a job as a computer programmer simply because they have a reliable wireless internet connection is an oversimplification.

“It may seem like there’s a low barrier to entry with the boot camp world,” said Liz Eggleston, co-founder of Course Report. “But that’s just not true. You have to have an outcomes team, real career advisers, and there has to be a market for developers in the area. And you have to know if those companies are comfortable hiring from a boot camp.”

In its training documentation, Mined Minds said it “will continue to grow a network of companies, both national and regional, that are committed to employing the graduates locally.” Because Mined Minds did not respond to follow-up requests for comment for this story, Postindustrial was unable to confirm whether such a network has materialized. However, the funding for this sort of coding training certainly exists.

In June 2017, the Appalachian Regional Commission named Mined Minds in a grant worth $1,489,945 that was awarded to the Washington Greene County Job Training Agency in Pennsylvania. The grant itself, split between Mined Minds and another Pennsylvania group, is part of the commission’s Appalachian Region Code Initiative to teach software programming to former workers from the coal sectors of southwestern Pennsylvania and West Virginia.

“The program is run on an expense-based model — they bill us for whatever work they do and for their employees and training costs,” said Jeffrey Nobili, program manager at the job training agency.

In other words, Mined Minds sends an invoice to Nobili’s people in order to pay the costs of operating its boot camps and the graduates it hires. A scan of Mined Minds’ latest 990 form, filed in 2017, shows it paid out $164,027 in salaries and employee benefits. That closely aligns with information the job training agency shared with reporter Kronk in 2018: The total contract with Mined Minds is $702,000, of which about $160,000 had been invoiced for by Mined Minds. To date, Nobili said Mined Minds has billed for $552,933 of its total contracted funds.

Whether that’s translating into stable jobs for West Virginia program graduates is the question. In Nobili’s telling, the answer is not yet. As of February 2019, according to numbers he tracks, Mined Minds has enrolled 61 students through this Code Initiative, and 34 of those people either are or were working for Mined Minds.

“While we’re training people with good skills, the competition for the employers looking for these skills is not out there yet,” he said.

For Frame and Cook, that’s the root of their anger and dissatisfaction with Mined Minds. They thought they were being trained for jobs in a regional technology sector — or, at the very least, that the skills they were acquiring would look attractive enough for a faraway company to take a chance on an underemployed boot camp graduate in Appalachia.

“That was the appeal for a lot of these folks [who] thought that in a very short period of time, they could improve their lives,” New said.

What they ultimately discovered is that no company wanted them. Buzzard said only two people he knew from Mined Minds went on to technology jobs not linked to Mined Minds — and at least one of them, he said, has a college degree.

“There’s a lot of false hope there for me,” said Buzzard, who’s grateful he kept his job at a tattoo parlor even while he was employed full-time with Mined Minds. “I learned from Mined Minds. I did learn something. I could go and code a website in a heartbeat. But it’s not here in the state.”