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Which I feel might be indicative of a larger problem. If you are going to deal with data (and its processing), it only makes sense to teach those skills in school itself.

They spend so much time memorizing random trivia maybe a course in handling data wouldn't be a bad idea.

Give them a break. They don't have the luxury of a highly-structured field, purposefuly constructed by humans (engineers & mathematiciens on top of that) with only 50 years of legacy.

They have to deal with a field that was haphasardly constructed by nature over the course of 4 billion years.

Imagine having to retro-document a code base with 4 billion years of history, created solely by junior developers fresh out of college..

This quote from the article says this work was being done be a developer(s) and if that is the case they should have know better.

The problem is that PHE's own developers picked an old file format to do this - known as XLS.

It's unlikely this was done by a developer in reality, and it's more likely to be a data analyst that was called a developer in the press release.