Ask HN: Has anyone gone from software to physical engineering?

Thought about this a handful of times in the past couple of years. My family is composed of mostly materials engineers, fab engineers and mechanical engineers. I'm one of the few who _chose_ to work on computers from the start.

In the end, these people get funneled into cubicles to do CAD/CAM work and spend their day fussing over customer foibles.

The pay is basically half of what I do and each promotion is more of a life event than anything. I've earned more per year in 5y in cybersecurity than my brother has in 18y as a fab engineer.

He loves his work though. Certainly has more days where he's pulling out his hair because he has to work alongside blue-collar, disinterested young adults though.

This! I joined a startup doing embedded work for robotics and it's a lot of fun. I love seeing things move because of the code I've written, and it really stretches your mind because you have to work in software, mechanics, EE, and CE. You end up learning a ton because of all the different challenges you have to work through.

> The level of expertise required to be "good" is very very deep

This is so true. I was working with an older ME who was nearing retirement. My code was controlling a subsystem he designed and he was going over it with me to figure out how to get the best performance. It was when he showed me that a minor change to the angle of a bracket had a huge impact on reliability that I realized that as much as I enjoyed mechanical design, I was just a dabbler. This guy was demonstrating decades of expertise and would think of things that never occurred to me.

I was half his age and was probably already making more than he was.

Don't do it. There's a reason there's way more EE and ME trying to get into pure software than the other way around. Software jobs are generally better quality of life, (way) better pay, better work location and time flexibility, and way-way-way less cat herding, logistics, and interaction with less technical parts of the business. Engineers are frequently overworked, unappreciated, and desk-bound.

I moved from software development (focusing on data binding through specification interpretation and code generation) to systems engineering for an industrial precision equipment manufacturer and then back into programming and project management.

I knew nothing about hardware engineering at all when I started: I was hired for my programming skills as, essentially, an SDET who was expected to pick up the hardware stuff on the job. It was a rough transition at times, but it was extremely worthwhile. It made me a far more critical thinker and exposed me to a world far beyond what a typical programmer would have had: I tinkered with robots, learned a little about experimental design, relearned some statistics I had forgotten, spent time in data wrangling and visualization, and worked with some incredibly brilliant people in the process.

If you are any good at architecting software systems (I am not), a baptism-by-fire is probably sufficient to acquaint you with systems engineering—although nothing will replace experience. I don't know that you'd need to go to school for it as long as you're prepared to ask stupid questions. My step-up manager told me that systems engineers are generally made rather than educated, and there's probably a bit of truth to that.