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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

This is pretty sad. I can never quite parse these kinds of corporate texts that sometimes speak vaguely. They mention a lack of funding and then “insurmountable challenges.” Were there other core issues or was it pretty much due to a lack of funding?

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From what I've seen of orgs run by the current generation of activists they always spread themselves too thin trying to do everything. This has been an issue in all well funded ngos I've seen from local hacker spaces to Mozilla.

When you inevitably fail because you can't fix everything the activists leave and you're left with a ruin where there used to be a useful civic organization.

This also causes an issue of coherence for your funder/donors: If I donate to an organization that is focused on X that I support, but then later that organization starts spending 10% of it's time on Y which I don't support - then what?

It's like when I buy stock in Acme which produces widgets, I don't want them starting up or acquiring a doodad business. If I wanted to invest in a doodad business I would do that directly.

No idea if that's the case with Women Who Code though.

The activists didn't leave. There are 343,000 of us still here, wondering where to go next. Seems like the board didn't think of that.

Perhaps the Unix philosophy applies here: do one thing well.

Having sat on a board of a 501(c)(3) organization before, it does indeed sound like a collapse of funding for their operating model, which is unfortunate for such a worthy mission. I've always wondered how well US-based donation-funded organizations placed in such a situation would fare with the following pitch to their donors, and would like others who have sat on more such boards for most of their lives to help me understand why funding models are so aggressively donation-driven year-to-year such that it exposes them so much to economic headline risk: everyone is cognizant of the economic precarity facing us all, how about we ask for one last donation until the Federal Reserve declares we're out of the (next) recession, we'll go into hibernation if necessary (only filing paperwork to keep the organization alive on paper, with a static web presence, and responding to inquiries with unpaid volunteers), but we'll dollar cost average the donation funds into a broad market index fund as we go into this economic slowdown on a timetable you agree to, only perform a 2% Safe Withdrawal Rate, we'll survive through this together, and once we're officially out of the recession and a year past that, only then we'll go around shaking the tin can for donations again.

It's also entirely possible that they are victims of their own success. It's no longer that unusual to see highly-technical women in very senior positions.

I've been coding since 1983, and have watched the demographics of our industry change from almost exclusively white male, to a pretty diverse lot. Some of my favorite "go to" blogs and whatnot, are run by women. Their gender doesn't matter a whit to me. They are good nerds.

Broadening the base is always an advantage. You have a larger pool of talent, from which to draw, but it's also a lagging indicator. It takes a while for the culture to establish, and the educational system to start delivering qualified candidates.

There are very few instances when "lack of funding" is not a root cause/symptom/result - it's the most common hard stop anyway. When they openly state that they could not raise money, it's okay to take it at face value.

The macro environment is not lending itself well to organizations that are not profitable or have a lot of cash on hand (for non-profits). With the overall trend in layoffs in tech combined with the difficulty in hiring - I can 100% see this being a major problem to their overall numbers leading to hard truths about fundraising.

And if lack of funding, that raises the question of why a lack of funding now. Did a regular large donor pull out? Did they decide to stop fundraising, or fail at it?

And what are the insurmountable challenges?

It's not at all sad the movement was clearly sexist. I specifically remember rejecting a funding request from them on the basis that one day I might have a son and he would be unwelcome to learn with the group.

AI? ChatGPT has seriously raised the baseline for what someone can achieve in coding without formal education, plus the software tooling has gotten easier. I remember when people would take classes to set up web backend/frontend boilerplate.

That's how I read it. Should be unsurprising in this tech economic environment and if some Fed watchers are correct, within the next 4-6 quarters, when the tech malaise extends to the general economic environment. When the cycle comes back in 6-10 years (unless generative AI sparks another dotcom burst sooner) and if there is demand for developers across the spectrum of experience again like the past cycle, expect these organizations to appear again.

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