DTech Alum Interviews: Archana Ahlawat
By: Joyce Choi
Tags: Career Change, Dtech Alum Interview

Huge thanks to Archana for her time on this interview and giving her thoughts on life since graduating! Archana is DTech Class of 2018, Duke Class of 2019, and is currently a software engineer at Color of Change.

Could you give an overview of what your journey post college journey has been like?

I moved to Seattle after graduation in July 2019 and started at Microsoft as a software engineer working on a call center data analytics service. In the last year, I gained a great technical and product foundation through taking my service from the ideation phase to deployment and incorporating customer feedback.

Outside of work, it took a long time to settle into full-time adult life and a new city. The first six months of post-grad are definitely an extended transitional time where you are figuring out how to live on your own, make friends outside of a college environment, and what you want to spend your free time on. One big priority that I had coming out of college was to get involved in grassroots organizing. I joined and explored organizations like Seattle South Asians for Black Lives and Tech Workers Coalition, and got to know Seattle City Council politics. These were really great experiences to help ground my in the Seattle community and continue developing my beliefs and theory of change.

After quarantine in Seattle began, I spent much of my time reflecting on my last year and what I wanted to do going forward, getting more into cooking and baking, and reading. In mid-summer, I started thinking seriously about potentially leaving Microsoft for a social good oriented opportunity after my one-year mark. I soon began the job search, applying to a few places including Color of Change, a racial justice nonprofit.

I received a job offer from Color of Change in early September, and was really excited and a bit nervous. I would have the opportunity to do impactful work as a founding engineer at a nonprofit that has been pivotal in advancing racial justice in a new digital age. I also felt very aligned with the leadership and the people I would be working with. It was still difficult to make the decision though, keeping in mind the trade-offs of leaving my first job at Microsoft at this time. At the end of the day, after considering different trade-offs and hearing thoughts of various mentors, family members, and friends, I knew that I had to take the job offer. The work, the purpose, the environment, and the growth potential all fit into my passions and long-term career ideas. Some important lessons that I learned through this process are to trust yourself to have a clear idea of what you want and to be more okay with risk at this age.

I started my job at Color of Change in early October and there’s been a steep learning curve that has been super rewarding and fascinating. So far, I have just been learning a lot about the behind-the-scenes of formulating political strategy, campaigning, and organizing. Since they are starting up the tech team from scratch, there is so much undefined and open opportunity to build and innovate internally and externally. I am also learning skills like how to establish a tech team, determine procedures and technical foundation, figure out how to interface with other internal teams, etc. Overall, I think I’m gaining a lot of skills and that it makes a difference caring so deeply about the mission of the organization.

You mentioned really trusting the Color of Change technical leadership. Can you go more into that in case other DTech scholars are wondering how to determine how strong the technical leadership is at another organization that they’re interested in joining?

At the top level, I think you have to try to have a really good understanding of where the organization as a whole sees itself going and how it wants to get there, as well as where technology fits into that. You can ask explicitly what the five year plan is and what the main goals are, and should expect well-thought out answers. You should also feel like you can ask questions about finances, like what funding looks like and how sustainable it is. This is to make sure that you’re at a place where you know you’ll be able to grow and know what to expect.

At an individual team level, it’s important to ask questions about team/organization leaders’ experiences in building up teams in the past, what their overall mindset is in approaching technical/interpersonal conflicts, how they’re going about building their current team, what’s most important to them. You want to ensure that you’re pretty aligned on those. This especially matters when you’re moving to a smaller environment because sometimes at a larger company those differences in style don’t matter as much because the processes are so established but when you’re on a smaller team, it’s more important that people are on the same page. At the end of the day, I also listened to my intuition when I was considering the Color of Change opportunity and knew that I was aligned with the mission and tactics.

How would you compare a standard SWE job with what you do now?

Being at Color of Change I feel like there’s an interesting balance between being like a start up and building the engineering team from scratch, but also balancing that with additional considerations of being a social justice nonprofit. The role is much more undefined than my previous SWE role at Microsoft. Because there aren’t any PMs, each engineer has to adopt a more expansive skillset to do user research, user design, project planning and management, on top of execution. For example, at Color of Change I have to use conversations with campaigners to identify their problems, figure out how the technology team can be useful, work on technical solutions, create roll-out plans, and monitor adoption and efficacy. Also, one aspect of being a founding engineer that is very different from a software engineer at a place like Microsoft is that you have to initially spend a lot of time determining project planning procedures, a basic tech stack, and tools. Usually software engineers in an existing tech team will have most of this technical foundation laid out for them already and don’t have to question them as much.

One thing that I think is unique about being in the social justice nonprofit space, similar to startups in general, is that there’s so much undefined and oftentimes, no one has a clear idea of what tech can do and help with, so you have to listen carefully for pain points, experiment with solutions, and be open-minded. Also, a really important skill is being able to understand whether or not a problem is best solved with a nontechnical solution or technical one.

You mentioned having to consider the trade-offs a lot. What are the trade-offs you had to consider?

At first, I was not sure whether I should leave Microsoft at the time or stay for another year or so to get in more foundational tech experience. Many people also advise that it is important to stay in a position for at least 2 years, so I thought carefully about the timing of my decision and the strength of the opportunity. I didn’t want to make a decision out of a fear mindset and wanted to be more embracing of risk this early in my career. From my perspective, if you do take a “risk” like this as a early-in-career software engineer, you are going to learn a lot of valuable lessons very fast, and even if things don’t work out as you expected, your skills are in high-demand and you likely have a large network of people to reach out to (like through the DTech community!). I was glad to have had some experience at Microsoft first, because when you are at an established company, you can learn best practices in terms of how to manage a technology team, how to manage products, plan out releases, etc. Then, when moving to a less defined environment, you can better establish yourself and your team.

Another big trade-off was going from a tech focused company to a nonprofit whose main work is campaign-related, not technical. While thinking about this adjustment, I considered the overall goals of the organization as well as the short and long-term plans for technology at Color of Change. Based on my knowledge and conversations with people working in this area, I knew that by making either decision, I would continue to grow, just in different ways. At Color of Change, I also would be able to gain a broader skillset because it is a much smaller organization.

What are you working on now?

Building up the Color of Change engineering team and internal infrastructure, building relationships with other teams, and understanding campaigner needs. They are establishing engineering processes and culture, as well as evaluating their technical capacity and ideas. They are working with the campaigners, who do the bulk of the work at Color of Change, to understand challenges and potential solution areas. Also, I am getting to know the movement technology space and learning about overall political strategy and how data and technology can fit into that.

Where do you hope to be in 5 years?

I want to continue exploring effective uses of software engineering skills and technical skills in general in the social justice space as a technical leader. Trying to understand how to use technology and data to progress social justice issues further is really important to me.

I also want to determine whether I want to go to grad school and what issues I want to dedicate myself to in the next couple of years. Two issues I want to explore more are techno surveillance and the gig economy.