I had the exact same experience, but a fairly clear flow into my career. My own tinkering led to a job at a local computer store fixing computers when I was abo

I had the exact same experience, but a fairly clear flow into my career. My own tinkering led to a job at a local computer store fixing computers when I was about 15, and then a job as a build engineer at 18. This was in the 90s so there weren’t a ton of college students with computer experience to compete with, and I think there was more openness to non-traditional candidates. My last job was product director for a major CI/CD platform, so there’s a pretty clear breadcrumb trail all the way back to tinkering with Linux on old hardware to now. The Linux command line and scripting was part of it, but the real deeper lesson was that computers are understandable and if you are persistent you can fix or improve nearly anything, or assemble something new and useful by building on what’s available to you.