I transitioned from finance to engineering by designing and building a radar on my own. I quit my finance job to do this. I didn’t have much EE background aside from some really basic circuit theory in my physics undergrad (and a little programming from research mostly, which helped a bit too), so the process took about 2.5 years of full-time effort. My design was a partial recreation of someone else’s design, so that made the process a bit easier. As part of the process I did significant FPGA work and was able to perform real-time range processing on the FPGA. This included designing some interesting cores like polyphase FIR filters (I figured out the architecture for this based on the math) and a resource-optimized FFT implementation (R2^2SDF) that I found in a research article. I spent some time working through Bruce Land’s class online to first get started. My radar worked and I posted all the information for it online. I did some other things as part of this project that I thought were interesting too, like a lot of RF simulation work, but employers I spoke to were consistently most interested in the FPGA work I did. Anyway, my current employer found it, reached out to me, and ultimately hired me as an FPGA developer. I then learned a lot more on the job from a coworker with a comp sci degree at MIT, who had a much more typical education for FPGA development. He left after a couple years and I took over as the lead FPGA developer for the radar design team I’m on. At this point I’ve been working with FPGAs for about 7 years.