I was kind of in the same position, so I found a niche where I'm both a pretty good engineer and a pretty good designer, which is the biotech / clinical trial s

I was kind of in the same position, so I found a niche where I'm both a pretty good engineer and a pretty good designer, which is the biotech / clinical trial space. (It's not hard to stand out in biotech if you do software) However, the pay is like 1/5 of tech ($70k-ish USD, and am living in Sydney, but the city is fairly livable on a lower wage unless we go house buying). but we do really cool stuff and we treat real patients with our clinical trial, which more than pays for it.