idk, hardware engineering (whether electrical, mechanical, civil, aerospace, etc) is just as lucrative and IMO more interesting, since physics isn't an invention of the human mind like software is, and mistakes go boom instead of segfault.
As an hardware engineer, I can't say if it's more interesting or not, but definitely a different mindset and tempo you have during development. Things are not running in a sandboxed environment where you can iterate theoretically endless times.