I started experimenting with "hardware stuff" late last year, when I had a month of paternity leave. I bought an arduio starter-kit, and the quickly moved on t

I started experimenting with "hardware stuff" late last year, when I had a month of paternity leave. I bought an arduio starter-kit, and the quickly moved on to using ESP8266-based devices. Both are programmed in "C++", and both are very easy to work with if you're already a programmer. Because the arduino, in particular, is aimed at beginners, you can get started by a process of almost lego-like construction. Plug some wirdes into the board, and attach the other end to a temperature-sensor. As for jobs I'm not sure, but I have posted a bunch of projects online which lead to random emails from people - one of those ended up leading to me getting paid to write some IoT code for an existing project. If you can work in the constraints of such a small device then other embedded stuff should be almost trivial. (most of the "embedded" stuff I've touched runs a complete operating system, rather than just a single program. So they're often still big. RTOS, etc, is "just" a matter of working with the OS API, and being aware of limits.)