Yes, I did, which helped with expenses. Funny thing is that once I got into the industry, I was the only engineer in my office who was an experienced programmer, so I ended up writing a decent amount of code for the job. It was a very satisfying way to rigorously learn methods of structural analysis, so I didn't feel like I was back to square one. And in the interviews for my subsequent jump back to the software business, when I got some questions about whether I felt rusty (they assumed I hadn't been writing software during school and aerospace), I could truthfully say that I'd programmed frequently enough that I wasn't out of practice.
This brings up a larger point I should have called out earlier: An experienced dev in a non-software field has a superpower. I'm no genius but because of my background, I was able to write software that made our engineering team more competitive, and I was able to negotiate good raises as a result. Everybody won.
