Since then I have learnt many things (including to obey safety warnings). One rule is that scientific research is collaborative in nature and the bigger your goals, the larger team. Good communication skills and teamwork are essential. With hundreds of collaborators across the globe this can be a challenge. I was familiar with Zoom long before Covid-19 forced it on school children.
My collaborators include people from many different backgrounds. Colleagues who are more theoretical in nature know the measurements that are needed while engineers on a project have a better understanding of practical matters. Working in instrumentation I am somewhere in the middle, translating the measurement goals into technical requirements, designing the instrument, getting it made, commissioning it, and finally delivering data back to the theorists. Seeing something I helped design become real working hardware is one of the parts of the job I like most.
Two decades working on astronomical instrumentation have taught me to be resourceful. The best observing sites are remote and desolate. I have spent extended periods in the field working on instruments at the top of Mount Teide in Tenerife and Green Bank in West Virginia. When commissioning an instrument, it is the responsibility of those on site to solve problems and get things working.
For this a wide range of skills is required. My specialties are RF optical design and cryogenics, which require proficiency at mechanical design and CAD (SolidWorks). A knowledge of electronics is needed - I have worked with analogue, digital, and radio frequency circuits. Then there is the software (from firmware in FPGAs to analysis software), without which no modern experiment can operate. Over the years I have programmed in many languages including machine code, C, fortran, IDL, and python.