I want to say apply to any job that seems interesting since some of the best programmers I've worked with on embedded systems came from desktop & web background

I want to say apply to any job that seems interesting since some of the best programmers I've worked with on embedded systems came from desktop & web backgrounds because they had a good grasp of modern development techniques as opposed to "hack & fix." But those were systems where we abstracted away as much of the hardware as we could so everyone could focus on "business logic." The hardware interface is the part that's hardest to debug, so we try to put as little as possible into those layers. Unfortunately, it sounds like that's exactly where you want to be working :-(