I just want to say that I've literally done this and it was awesome. Granted it was when I was at university and it was a "part time" job, but I've often thought about going back. Now this is going back 30 years and academia in NA has probably changed a lot, but at least at that time most of the top research groups had enough money to hire full time "technicians". At my university it was a union position, so the pay and benefits were not bad compared to the rest of society. Of course compared to the high tech industry, the pay was not even close :-) Probably for that reason, every body I worked with was passionate, brilliant and more than a bit quirky. Anyway, I ended up working in a chemistry group doing crystallography, a physics group doing high energy physics and an astronomy group that was working on community education programs. Each team had really interesting challenges.

One thing I would caution (from my experience) is that the attitude was very much "get it to work" vs "do it properly". I was writing software and had quite a bit of freedom, but the hardware guys were often tasked with, "We have this problem and there is nothing that we can buy/afford that will solve it. Could you please invent something? You have that mountain of spare parts from previous projects to work with". They would be wandering around the department saying things like, "Do you need that <whatever piece of electronics> any more?", and then would steadfastly break it down to get the parts/components that they needed. Probably less reusable stuff in electronics these days, but I remember being pretty awestruck at the time by what they could scavenge and then build.

I remember in the physics lab, my supervisor/boss had bought a laser printer from Europe. Because it was 240 volt, they built a voltage doubler so that they could use it. One day they accidentally plugged it into 2 voltage doublers and... well, predictably it no longer worked. But my buddy quite happily pounced on the dead carcass and I don't think it lasted more than a couple of hours before the working parts were repurposed for something else.

Like I said, this was a long time ago, but I imagine things still mostly work the same. Awesome place to work.

I currently work for a UK based particle physics facility and a lot of what you say is still true, it is an awesome place to work.

The tension between "get it to work" and "do it properly" is still there, particularly when there is pressure for results for conference papers. We try to do things properly though, simply due to the more onerous safety regulations now. It is interesting coming across various historical bodges that lurk in dark corners, sort of little engineering time capsules.