front matter
In 2015, I interviewed for a data operations analyst position at Indeed.com, the world’s largest jobs site. For my final technical challenge, I was asked to derive insights from an internal data set, using the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet software. Eager to impress, I pulled out as many tricks as I could from my data analysis toolbox: column sorts, text manipulations, pivot tables, and of course the iconic VLOOKUP function. (OK, maybe iconic is a bit of an exaggeration.)
Strange as it may sound, at the time I didn’t realize that there were any tools for data analysis besides Excel. Excel was ubiquitous: my parents used it, my teachers used it, and my colleagues used it. It felt like an established standard. So when I received a job offer, I immediately bought about $100 worth of Excel books and started studying. It was time to become a spreadsheet specialist!
I showed up for my first day of work with a printout of the 50 most-used Excel functions. Barely after I finished logging into my work computer, my manager pulled me into a conference room and informed me that priorities had shifted. The team’s data sets had ballooned to a size that Excel could no longer support. My teammates were also looking for ways to automate the redundant steps in their daily and weekly reports. Luckily, my manager had figured out a solution to both problems. He asked me whether I’d heard of pandas.