I regreted getting out in that I took a large paycut (50%) when I dropped out but I was able to start making it up quickly as I got promoted about 6 months in. (I only ended up making up about half of what I lost so for me software definitely has more $ potential) Depending on the field you get into, a lot of the technical skills you acquire are really just logical ways of problem solving. These skills can be applied to a variety of fields, making things that a majority of others may find challenging into relatively trivial challenges. Not because I was smarter than anyone else but just because developers are trained to approach problems in a specific way. I got into analytics, so if you jumped into sales or something like that your mileage may vary. I was also able to leverage my programming background to creating some automated vba scripts which carved hundreds of hours a year off of my teams workload. Simple scripts that any developer could do but only a developer would think to do. These scripts led to some nice pay bumps.

Nicest part was being able to leave work at the office, it hit 5 o'clock and I was gone. I got to enjoy personal and family time.

I worked for a very large company when I got out which I had not done before and I learned how political things can be. I also got to interact with non-technical co workers which was a nice change of pace.

I do regret the years lost from a software career perspective but when I got out I was fried so I may not have been that far ahead anyway if I stayed in.

I would probably do it again if I had to, it was good to see what else is out there. A career is a long time and I wanted to be sure.

"I was also able to leverage my programming background to creating some automated vba scripts which carved hundreds of hours a year off of my teams workload. Simple scripts that any developer could do but only a developer would think to do."

This is the sort of thing I enjoy. If you work as a regular programmer, you're usually walled off from the effects of your work, and you can spend months on a big project and then it all gets scrapped or becomes pointless for reasons outside of your control. And there are innumerable cogs between you and the customer/client. Your managers and PMs don't truly know what they want either. But helping someone that you interact with daily is tremendously more rewarding, regardless of how cool the technology is or isn't to the cognoscenti.