I find that physical work is different but not simpler than programming. Yes there are only 3 dimensions, but there are lots of layers of important "details" that you can't ignore, whereas digital work only deals with "ideal" objects, which simplifies a lot.
> digital work only deals with "ideal" objects, which simplifies a lot
I'm not clear what you mean by that. Most of the library code I deal with is far from ideal (IMO). Even most of the things I implement aren't ideal because either I'm interacting with the real world or even if not I don't want to spend unlimited time fully generalizing it.
As a concrete example, absolutely nothing that touches floating point arithmetic is "ideal" in any sense of the word.
