I went to school for engineering but around the time I graduated it wasn't a great market for what I went to school for (mechanical engineering, because…it was oversaturated). I got into construction as a sort of estimator/designer/project manager hybrid (small company).
I've been drawing shop drawings and been in construction for about 10 years at this point, but I kind of felt a very solid ceiling at my last job, and I have 2 kids so that's kind of unacceptable at 33. I've learned a lot about coding over the past couple of years and have been implementing a lot of that into translating data flows into my computer aided drawing.
At my newest job I showed my current manager my scripting (I do AutoLISP in AutoCAD) and he was very impressed, and has been very enthusiastic about me building plugin-adjacent tooling for the department. People are very enthusiastic about the stuff I'm making (stuff that, for example, collapses operations budgeted for 40 hours into 2-4 with most of that being manual validation). This is also happening at a very large multinational corporation, so any tooling I make could be used widely, especially since I'm engineering it for robustness and ergonomics.
I guess I'm wondering if anyone else has actually taken a high-leverage direction like this and it actually paid off. It's definitely a more interesting engineering problem than simply generating shop drawings, but I would also like it to demonstrably improve my family's quality of life.