This is how I started.
C64 assembly from age of 14-15, Amiga1000 assembly, soldering electronics at home, lower tech edu in electronics, computing and industrial control (working as programmer during summer holidays).
1st job in embedded 1992 (PCB design, PIC16C71-assembler, C and Assembler on x86)
Jobs in sales, bartending. Hobby FIS alpine ski racing.
1995/6-2000 EE studies (RF, analog, antennas, analog CMOS-design) and Linux as hobby.
Linux use: Debian (mostly), Mint, OpenWRT, Ubuntu, SuSE, RedHat/Fedora, Knoppix, Gentoo, Mandriva (when it was called Mandrake), Slackware (briefly).
A couple of jobs in teaching (programming, electronics, Linux, networking).
A couple of jobs in EE.
Attending Digi-Key continuing education center training for fun in the evenings. Have my own EE lab at home and plenty of devices running Linux.
Want to learn more about FPGAs, bootloaders, device drivers, making board support packages and hopefully build my own Linux controlled CPU+FPGA-based SW HAM-Radio from scratch one day.
Favorite Sites:
merproject, designnews, phoronix, openwrt, linuxdevices, lwn