alt Hacker NewsIn my (possibly not the best) opinion the most important quality will be to not delude oneself with the idea that their method or field is the most important field in all of science. Unfortunately academic structures force you to think and believe that and then proselytize that way. But if you stay above it at least in my books you're above most folks. But then I'm a lowly guy in a corner lol.
Practically what this means is that you should decide what you truly want to change (not necessarily what you can change with your current expertise) and pursue it across whatever fields necessary. If it's curing a disease, you have to decide what is the most important thing that's stopping us from curing that disease and pursue that exact topic. More often than not it's not anything software related. You have to grab a pipette at some point and guillotine a few mice at another lol.
I once met a scientist who spent a week traveling to where there was a powerful x-ray laser. He used it to blast a thin film of something or other that was floating on the surface of some water. He left with a flash drive full of data and some FORTRAN titled LSQREFL, which allegedly could decode the laser results. He then spent the next 6 months trying to make it actually do that. Turns out you had to have a folder with today's date on it on your desktop, otherwise the program would crash. This was documented nowhere, he just eventually puzzled it out from the code.
I offered to put it on github for him, so that at least he didn't have to be the sole caretaker for this endangered bit of software, but he was afraid of running afoul of the original author's rights, so endangered it will stay.
This was maybe an unlikely occurrence, falling neatly in the not part of your:
> More often than not it's not anything software related
But it makes me think that there is still some juice left to squeeze out there. I mean, I'm having a good time with my one-class-per-semester, I'd just prefer to not have to do it for another decade before I'm enough of a biologist to get my hands dirty.