Reminds me of an account of Italian would-be thieves who broke into what they took to be the rear of a shop only to realise on entering it was the local police station… Apparently they incorrectly counted the number of buildings. You don’t say.

I get something very similar. Biologists sometimes talk to me as if (good) computational biology or bioinformatics analyses are “instant”! It’s not as bad as CSI-type thinking, and not true for many people that talk to me, but there are some who are unrealistic. My suspicions are that because they’ve seen pictures of nice GUI-based applications and think it’s just a matter of popping the data in, selecting a few options and pushing “Go”. You might possibly get some answers, of some kind, that way but it’s not a good idea if you care about the results at all.

In a related way, people too often come to me too late, after they’ve tried themselves and gotten themselves a bit stuck, expecting a quick fix.

There’s a lot more to it, but you’ll get a least some of the idea.

I agree with the quality control issues. It’s been a concern of mine for a long time for many aspects of computational biology, including that within commercial companies.