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by SonicScrub 1771 days ago
I don't work in bioinformatics, but what you are describing is a completely accurate description of what I experienced working in manufacturing quality control. Raw data came in from suppliers in the form of spreadsheets, and management wanted to see results in spreadsheets. Meaning all our quality data was subjected to these issues. The date formatting issue was a particularly annoying "gotcha", particularly when features were defined with a XX-XX numeric code. The number of times I had to deal with someone in a meeting saying "hey, why is this feature called October-13?!" Super frustrating.

If I could choose the tools used by the whole process involving multiple different companies and departments, hey I would! It would be python all the way down. But I was but a cog in a massive organization.
1 comments
dragonwriter 1771 days ago
> A lot of "safety culture" is composed of things like checklists and hazard warnings which are more geared towards shifting the blame for accidents onto somebody else than actually preventing those accidents,

If you stay in spreadsheets these problems mostly don’t occur (that is, once data entry is squared away so that the initial spreadsheet has what you want it doesn't tend to get lost), its when you move in and out of spreadsheets via text and take the path of least resistance [0] to do the transition that the problem occurs.

[0] and to be fair, there is a lot of resistance off that path.

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SonicScrub 1771 days ago
The process I had to deal with was filling out spreadsheets with data from a python-driven 3D inspection program that exported out data files in CSV format. Needless to say, these errors were inevitable for exactly the reasons you've stated. Why we didn't bypass the large, poorly formatted cumbersome spreadsheets and just directly export data via pandas? All the inspection was done by Python anyways. You tell me! Also, it did not help that the spreadsheets were not created by me, or any colleagues in my department.

God I hated working in old-school engineering/manufacturing. "That's not how we do things" is the answer to everything. I

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dragonwriter 1771 days ago
Sorry about the misplaced quote. Meant to be a quote from the immediate upthread comment. Looking back, it probably wasn't even needed, the response works fine against the comment as a whole.
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