It does rather depends what sort of data I bet a data engineer at CERN or JPL has quiet a different set of required skills to say Google or a company playing at

It does rather depends what sort of data I bet a data engineer at CERN or JPL has quiet a different set of required skills to say Google or a company playing at data science because its the next big thing. I should imagine at CERN etc knowing which end of soldering iron gets hot might still be required in some cases. I recall back in the mumble extracting data from b&w film shot with a high speed camera, by projecting it on to graph paper taped to the wall and manualy marking the position of the "object"