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

Yeah but if they’re motivated by learning new things better to learn new things while staying highly profitable, else they’ll just burn out again in the new field. The problem is the job structure.

Beware - I know around a dozen people who have done the opposite - moved from mechanical/biomechanical/electrical/nuclear/chemical engineering to software. I don't know anyone whose done the opposite, I don't think it's very common.

For what I hear from these people, they unanimously say that there's many more (quantity) and better (quality) jobs in software compared to their original field. This is probably a biased sample, so take it with a grain of salt.

I think you need to investigate what exactly is causing the burnout issues. It could be a whole new career isn't the thing that will fix it. I don't know you, so I can't make a judgement either way - just be very careful before spending thousands of dollars and years of your working life on school. Doing so could make your problems worse.

A while ago a family member was suffering from extreme burnout at his job. That person's mother (a very naive person) strongly encouraged him to leave the field he works in entirely, whereas I could see the problem was entirely personal and changing careers wouldn't help and would likely hurt him. I encouraged him to work on some personal issues before making such a decision, he did, and almost an entire decade later he is in the same field and doing much better.

I also left engineering for law. Money was a factor when I applied, but also I did not like being pigeon holed in my engineering career. I do patent litigation, so I get to see discovery on the whole system as opposed to portions of it for a variety of technologies (i.e., network security, semiconductors, mechanical devices). I only had about 2 years of engineering experience (working in defense industry), but found the career boring and the pay low (~60k starting vs $160k starting in big law (which is now $205k starting)). Granted, I do think if I went to silicon valley when I graduated, I may have found a better position at a start-up environment. After 10 years of patent litigation, I do find it boring, but at least I am paid well comparatively to my SV engineering friends.

Why not do both?

Fortuitous timing for this ask and while I will presume you imply 'career change' my response is not to that degree yet here is my 2¢ for those that may find value.

I have undertaken extensive learning in electrical and mechanical engineering in recent months but from an applied perspective as I am dogfooding my own ideas after calculating that my recently installed PV system will be producing far more energy than I have chemical battery storage capacity. While my degree is in software engineering my current personal energy solution design correlates nicely to the global energy storage demand that is rapidly growing. As the sole creator and architect of the technology around my past founded entities, and in conjunction with my diverse exposure to physical and logical build outs; residential, commercial and industrial, I am heavily consuming and learning information as it relates to electrical and mechanical engineering in solving my own energy abundance issue. The technology side of my problem is "easy" having built several enterprise platforms but in learning anything new mistakes will always be made, that's the fun part! The speed at which I am able to learn and apply these concepts never would have been possible without the internet, we live in truly surreal times.

Point being that if one is motivated enough one can do anything you put your mind to no matter what anyone else tells you. I have been mocked and laughed at for my ideas and once you get past what other people think the world is your oyster, maybe it has a pearl in it or maybe not.