A People Systems Analyst at Whatnot on ranching, unstructured thinking, and why the real promise of AI might be getting out of the way.
Emma Coppin
Multimedia Content Lead, Thought Leadership and Customer Stories
Workday
Mario Hernandez, people systems analyst at Whatnot, began his journey in the hills and forests of the San Geronimo Valley, walking the leaf-littered paths beneath towering redwoods and splashing across the creek that ran through his family's 25-acre horse ranch.
“I'd get lost in my own fantasy worlds,“ he says. “I spent a lot of time alone as a kid. That worked out for me, because I was a very quiet kid.”
That solitude sparked a lifelong practice of contemplation and curiosity. On a coast-to-coast road trip as a child, he memorized state birds and wildflowers out the window, peppering his grandparents with questions the whole way.
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Hernandez, whose acoustic guitar hung in frame as we spoke, studied music in college. Not with ambitions to join the industry, he clarifies, but because it was the only subject he could imagine holding his attention for four years.
He graduated in 2009, right into a recession. Like most of his peers, he accepted whatever job would take him. In Hernandez's case, that meant working construction for $9 an hour. When a payroll position came through at $14, he took it without hesitation.
That launched nearly a decade in the payroll industry, where he rose from processor to lead roles at companies across the Bay Area. When one employer implemented a new HR platform, he was pulled into the testing process, and something clicked. Coming from years of working with legacy systems, the difference was stark. “You can actually see how everything works, how it's all connected,“ he says. He knew immediately he wanted to be on the other side of it—in configuration rather than end use. He had found his direction.
"You can actually see how everything works, how it's all connected."
But first, he took a side quest to a horse ranch, where he worked for nearly four years as a ranch manager. His thinking: “If I don't do it now, I might never have the opportunity.“
This period deepened his appreciation for the kind of ingenuity borne of necessity.
Farmers and ranchers, he observes, are some of the most resourceful people he's met—the kind who fix a broken tractor themselves because calling a mechanic isn't always an option. He got a good dose of that willingness. “Almost the messier the better,“ he says of the sort of problems he enjoys troubleshooting. “There's so much opportunity to evolve this into something that actually works.“
In 2019 he returned to the corporate world, carrying that drive with him. Today, beyond his work as a systems analyst, he serves as a Workday Community Ambassador, helping others navigate the HR tech landscape.
On the ranch, one of Hernandez’s regular tasks was dragging the riding arena to smooth the sand after hard use. The process involves driving a tractor in circles for half an hour—the kind of repetitive task that he treasures for how it frees his mind to go wherever it wants.
“I would think about the wildest things,“ he says, recalling that time. He called the fruits of this time Tractor Thoughts—ideas, to-do lists, half-formed solutions that floated to the surface precisely because his hands were occupied and his mind was free. “Sometimes your mind works best when you're not sitting in front of a computer.“
It's the same satisfaction he finds in things like sorting a bin of fasteners, a long mountain bike ride, or a walk with no destination. These moments, Hernandez asserts, are where the real work gets done. But only if you protect the time for them.
"Sometimes your mind works best when you're not sitting in front of a computer."
This is where AI enters the conversation, and where Hernandez's view diverges from the predominant narrative. The promise he sees in it is recovery, not speed. If the right tools can absorb the hours lost to data conversions and manual processes, what comes back isn't increased capacity for more work, but rather space to actually think.
The risk is that nobody protects it. “What I've seen happen is leaders say, 'Oh, now we can just do more things faster.’” The time AI frees up gets filled before anyone thinks to ask whether it should be. That, he argues, is a leadership question as much as a technology one. Someone has to decide that recovered time is worth protecting—that the point isn't throughput, but the quality of thinking that only happens when the mind has room to wander.
At every stage of his career, Hernandez has been drawn to the problem behind the problem. Payroll taught him where organizations break down. HR systems showed him why. Now his sights are set further back still, on becoming the kind of strategic advisor who shapes how a system is built before the break points exist.
“The more I've gone into the weeds of fixing configuration, the more interested I am in getting upstream,” he says. Solving problems may be satisfying but getting ahead of them is the point.
It's the same instinct that sent a curious kid into the woods.
These days, that curiosity has plenty to work with, as he settles into a new home just up the road from where he took his first steps on this path. With a young family, a full garden, and an HRIS career to keep him busy, Hernandez is looking forward to solving life’s most rewarding problems.
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