Maybe it's just because my pops built most of the furniture in my house, but building a desk which can support a computer and last doesn't strike me as a particular project prone to failure. A lot of us are engineers who work on much more complex problems (although it's true that you must measure twice and cut once with wood working).
Lots of computer engineers are good and some even great with their hands. And with the older generation that skews even further towards being good with both (after all, you needed a soldering iron + skills first if you wanted to learn how to program).
Thankfully there are still plenty of places where skills like programming and soldering intersect in the "modern era." I also feel (maybe I should say I hope) that we'll see a resurgence in this set of skills in the future as the old guard starts to retire (soon).
I was fortunate to have started my career in the embedded world. I eventually got in to the habit of bringing my laptop and prototypes with me to the lab every morning so that I could stop all of the back-and-forth walking when I needed to attach a lead to a pad, etc...