After 9 years as a programmer at a small polyglot dev shop, I moved to a publicly-traded industrial hardware firm as a systems engineer a few years ago. There's a bit of overlap between programming and systems engineering (requirements analysis, testing and test design, failure cause analysis, et c.), but I knew nothing about hardware. (I was very open about this, and they hired me anyway. So far, so good.)
On the balance, I've found it to be remarkably similar to being a software generalist. You have to know something about everything and everything about something (I stretch a little, but my core competency is programming; the rest I learn as I go). You get to be engaged at all points by all people throughout the product development life-cycle. For my part, it's taught me a lot and definitely made me a more critical thinker.
Downsides include more red tape, similar mentoring problems due to personnel churn, and occasional tensions due to aligning more on shareholder than employee goals. Our project management is also a bit dicey.
I've toyed with getting back into programming full time, and the career switch has cost me a bit there. While I think my coding chops are still decent (I program daily and grab a few minutes sometimes for personal projects at home), my vocabulary has suffered, and that definitely cost me in recent interviews.
On the balance, I've found it to be remarkably similar to being a software generalist. You have to know something about everything and everything about something (I stretch a little, but my core competency is programming; the rest I learn as I go). You get to be engaged at all points by all people throughout the product development life-cycle. For my part, it's taught me a lot and definitely made me a more critical thinker.
Downsides include more red tape, similar mentoring problems due to personnel churn, and occasional tensions due to aligning more on shareholder than employee goals. Our project management is also a bit dicey.
I've toyed with getting back into programming full time, and the career switch has cost me a bit there. While I think my coding chops are still decent (I program daily and grab a few minutes sometimes for personal projects at home), my vocabulary has suffered, and that definitely cost me in recent interviews.