I think an important difference, for me, is that at a certain point the chest of drawers is finished.

Software - or at least, the kind of software I have worked on in my career - is never finished. It is a neverending ship of theseus.

I can muster motivation to try really hard on something that has an end point. But the idea of maintaining that kind of motivation and focus on a project that just goes on and on and on is, for me, near-unimaginable. You could pay me a million dollars a year and I think I would still really struggle with it. It's something I think about a lot and struggle with, because I have certainly had colleagues who seem to be able to maintain that level of craft on software projects.