The NY Times has a great article about the satisfaction and joy that comes from working with your hands. The nice quote:

The trades suffer from low prestige, and I believe this is based on a simple mistake. Because the work is dirty, many people assume it is also stupid. This is not my experience. I have a small business as a motorcycle mechanic in Richmond, Va., which I started in 2002…. I have found the satisfactions of the work to be very much bound up with the intellectual challenges it presents.

But here is the deal, the author, Matthew B. Crawford also has a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Chicago. I think all good engineers have an appreciation for hands-on work. It is one of the satisfying things about engineering, that it has a heavy intellectual aspect, full of theory and math and computers, but it also has a hands-on component where you build things and solder breadboards and wire in prototypes, all the while using one of the most intellectually demanding tasks, troubleshooting. There is a reason job ads for engineers often say they need a “hands-on” person. A manufacturing company can’t sell simulations and theory. They need a real product.

Crawford has sounded off on this subject before, and I blogged about it a few years ago.