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

Important context is that my undergraduate degree was in mechanical engineering, even though I ended up moving straight into CS afterwards.

I found a job as a machine design engineer at a company that designs computer controlled milling machines and I've loved it ever since. 90% of my day to day job is mechanical, but I have a plenty of domain specific knowledge to handle the CNC side of things. I've found it's the perfect balance for me.

One word of caution for you about physical engineering: If you are working at a company that sells a physical product (not just working on 100% research and development ala Bell Laboratories) you will spend a lot of your time working on supply chains, handling quality control, helping the purchasing department, answering customer support questions that are escalated to you, etc. I would say that actual textbook mechanical engineering is about 20% of the job.

Addendum: I see that you are interested in the machining side of things as well. If you are looking for mechanical design jobs, this is something you will want to ask about early in the interview process. Some companies never let mechanical designers into the R&D lab to make prototypes and instead have a dedicated staff that only does that. Other companies (like mine) specifically select for engineers with manufacturing skills and encourage you to be able to make your own prototypes.

1) Always change companies, change industries, and/or change locations multiple times before trying a career change. Unfortunately, if you are the type of person who gets burned out in software then you’re almost certainly going to get burned out in other engineering disciplines unless you learn how to manage your stress and self. Better to learn stress management and burnout prevention before investing in a career change.

2) Always get hands-on experience in an industry before investing in education to switch to it. Spending 2-4 years getting another degree is insanely expensive when you include the cost of lost wages and starting over as a junior. This alone could burn you out even more. You need to be 100% sure that the other career is the correct choice for you before you invest in education.

I got an interest what I'll call "human scale" electronics after getting and learning how to restore a 1985 VW van. That led to getting into the dash electronics, with through-hole LEDs, resistors, and the like, and me remembering playing with these things in childhood electronics kits.

From there, I started getting into microcontroller learning kits from Sparkfun, then something clicked about Raspberry Pi computers when I realized the GPIO pin bank could control lights, sensors, and sound, while building in software in the Linux environment I knew.

Once I started building custom electronics, I got an interest in enclosures for custom builds and then into 3D printing.

From 3D printing, I wanted to learn more about CAD (FreeCAD, OpenSCAD, Fusion 360, Shapr3D), mesh design & 3D modeling in Blender.

Today I'm doing a combination of microcontroller project consulting (where a solid C/C++ background helps tremendously), 3D modeling and prototyping, and working on a personal physical product for which I am writing the whole software stack.

Personally I feel that coming to hardware with a strong software background helps in code/firmware organization, thinking about flexibility, and fast prototyping.

I started out as an EE doing mostly hardware work, continued to do more HW/SW integration and now do essentially 100% software work but with the ability to read and interpret schematics, datasheets, figure out HW/SW integration bugs etc. I have done a ton of physical system integration: i.e., getting my software to make things move, move properly, and work around mechanical or electrical bugs. Yes, there are also bugs in mechanical and electronic systems, and it's usually cheaper to "just fix it in software!"

You may just be switching one kind of burnout for another...

One of the most telling remarks I remember was from a friend who had done mainly software and was now coding for the electromechanical system that I worked on: "I'd really just rather work with the Simulator because when I put my code on hardware then I have to deal with a whole other set of problems that have nothing to do with software."

He eventually got past that but that's why I think you need to be really clear about what you want to get out of doing this.

You’ll also be a much smaller cog in a much larger machine. You can’t single handedly design a bridge the way Torvolds wrote the Linux kernel. That’s ultimately what convinced me to pivot to avionics and then ultimately software as I got through my degree.

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.

At this point am the head of development at my company working on pretty wild projects like this:

https://norphonic.com/products/evacsound/

…or seemingly simple but painstakingly elaborate designs like this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRXfV7x-dlo

Most of the meat in ME/EE is put on the bones by my talented colleagues, while I do outline approaches to implement and sign off the designs and still lean heavily on SW side.

I empathize deeply with the interest in being more physically situated and to use my body for thinking. Personally I'm still waiting for physical computing to happen (a la Dynamicland.org or something similar) so I can have my cake and eat it too!

I've personally settled with balancing software day job work with more physical hobbies and activities outside of work. Cooking, gardening, walking, etc. I like Cal's Deep Life framework here the best: https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2020/04/20/cultivating-a-dee...

Another option to consider is to assess / reflect on the hard-won skills you have in software and see if you can't find a way to do it part-time / consulting instead. Maybe you need to move to a cheaper location to make this happen, not sure! But being able to charge $75 - 200 an hour and live in a cheap place means you could end up working only 15-20 hours a week. This way, you retain your skills but can fill the rest of your time with more physical hobbies.

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.

However, from your statement, I would ask the following question: What is it you are looking for? It sounds like the underlying project goals might not be interesting enough and if you found something more meaningful/impactful it might be more stimulating?

I constantly think about different careers and grass is greener kind of thought process and come back to first principles. What is it I want out of life?

I studied Engineering Science with Computer Science, did some Electronic Engineering before focusing on software.

Studying diverse fields of engineering is intellectually stimulating and creates lots of transferrable skills (Who knew all that math I learned makes learning ML easy?). You will be open to jobs both in physical and software engineering + It's harder to be self-taught in physical engineering.

..Just be aware the job market for physical engineering is orders of magnitude smaller than software engineering. You will have less choice and lower pay. Most of the smart engineers I know with degrees from good schools ended up in software.

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.