I think there IS a difference, I just don't know exactly what... So I am just thinking loudly: The diffrence may be that you have to work on a relatively risky

I think there IS a difference, I just don't know exactly what... So I am just thinking loudly: The diffrence may be that you have to work on a relatively risky product which when executed with extremely high attention to detail can have huge impact. A consumer hardware is seemingly such a thing. Probably a new programming language or a very elegant software lib either. The boring Java business application which I am maintaining at my workplace right now and contains hundreds of tables and hundreds of thousands lines of code, but only has impact on a relatively few customers is not such a thing. My side project, which is a relatively small (but relatively risky in its approach) software lib might be such a thing. TLDR: When executing something which is not risky and not very innovative and/or cannot have high impact by nature (niche market) but takes a lot of grunt work, high attention to detail does not pay off.