Day 1: Diving In

Hello, world.

Those are scary words. I am not a programmer. I am a people person. I dreamed my whole life of becoming a teacher, and slowly shifted my career path to land in Human Resources during college. I was interested in training, and development, and helping people meet their full potential.

I was not interested in numbers, or math, or analysis, or computer stuff.

While working in HR, my responsibilities have been wide and varying–making sure our employee data is accurate, helping new team members through their first day at work, discussed benefits design, delved into compensation. Recently, my job duties have focused in two areas: (1) diversity and inclusion, and (2) people analytics.

The first is a natural good fit for me. I am not afraid to say that I’m a feminist, but more than that, I’m a people-ist. I believe in equal opportunity for everyone, that all people regardless of their background or their unique characteristics are valuable and worthy of love. In my role, I try to see ways that we can provide a fairer shake for all people, and ways that we can make sure diverse populations feel included. Having diversity of people and of thought isn’t worth much until people feel valued and empowered.

People analytics is something I fell into. When I started in HR, as an intern, I ran reports and did simple audits to make sure data made sense. Over time, however, my job evolved to include much more time looking at spreadsheets, scanning for trends and trying to tell a story. And I love it. This is something I never expected to do, or to feel passionate about. Math was always a “meh” subject for me; I got into HR for the people. But finding patterns, and, more than that, solving problems, is exciting. Slicing and dicing data requires focusing on detail while seeing the big picture, and it almost always leads to an opportunity to learn, to improve, and to make a difference. It excites me.

So, I spend most of my workday on a computer, in Excel, moving data around. But, programming? Psh. That’s not my thing.

I have some experience with it–I’ve taken a few classes, and my husband (himself a developer) would love if I learned to code. Heck, I even think it would be cool to learn.

But programming terrifies me. Something about it just makes me panick-y. Working in diversity and inclusion, the dearth of women in programming is glaringly obvious to me, and something that I think warrants increased discussion. I’m all for women in tech, and for quite a while, I’ve wanted to challenge the stereotype, stand up to the system, and code. But it’s dang scary.

In the midst of all of this, a co-worker mentioned to me that I should look into R, a language that is increasingly being used for data analysis at my company. There was a basic training video circulated internally, something she said I should look into. I put it off for weeks, which was fine, since I had a lot of other work to do. In the back of my head, I knew it would likely come in handy in my day-to-day work–even eliminate a huge portion of my job which I find most boring. But, I procrastinated.

Until yesterday. Yesterday, I watched the training video. I saw the value, the way it could transform my job. I committed to learn. To do it. It was terrifying.

So here is my journey.