The biggest difference to my mind is that at end of a day you have something concrete to look at and say “I done that”.
In software or business we spend so much time on intangibles. Often worthwhile, but just not viscerally satisfying. “I am mentally fatigued because I refactored the whole controller layer of this app. It turned out the proposed redesign wasn’t worth pursuing so we reverted the commit, but the knowledge gained from this spike was very valuable!”
Hits very different to “All my muscles hurt. I dug that hole. That one right there.”
The line between being fulfilled by manual labour versus being crushed by it is flexibility. If you’re choosing when to work and what to work on, you’ll probably love it. When you’re working through an injury on the hottest day of the year and the aircon on the truck is broken and all the fire in the area was put out days ago anyway… you’ll wish you were refactoring.
In software or business we spend so much time on intangibles. Often worthwhile, but just not viscerally satisfying. “I am mentally fatigued because I refactored the whole controller layer of this app. It turned out the proposed redesign wasn’t worth pursuing so we reverted the commit, but the knowledge gained from this spike was very valuable!”
Hits very different to “All my muscles hurt. I dug that hole. That one right there.”
The line between being fulfilled by manual labour versus being crushed by it is flexibility. If you’re choosing when to work and what to work on, you’ll probably love it. When you’re working through an injury on the hottest day of the year and the aircon on the truck is broken and all the fire in the area was put out days ago anyway… you’ll wish you were refactoring.