I was tinkering with electronic stuff probably when I was about 9, didn't actually accomplish much but had fun with it.
Started building various things from tube and transistor data books when I was maybe 12. I converted a war surplus radar scope to a very primitive oscilloscope when I was about 16. I got hired as a technician at an outfit that did communications research and field testing as a summer job when I was 18, just before going off to college (1968).
I got a summer job in 1975 that turned into a career, and built and connected up air pollution measuring instruments for a group doing EPA studies. Some of it was from aircraft, so we had a lot of interesting integration/interfacing tasks to tie our data acq. gear into the plane's nav system, run instruments off 28 V without allowing spikes through, etc.
I did that for 9 years, and then moved over to another group doing basic nuclear science (shooting ions from particle accelerators at targets and measuring the particles that fly off.) We make most of our own data acq. gear as nothing commercial is compact or cheap enough, when you are talking about 100+ channels. Now, we are making our own ICs to make it smaller and cheaper. One channel is a discriminator (detects occurrence of signal arrival), active filter and peak detector. Then, put 16 of those channels on one chip, 2 chips on a board and 16 boards on a motherboard, in a housing roughly the size of a breadbox. So, that is 512 channels. So, that has been a good part of my work for the last 10 years.
I wrote the GUIs that set up the chip's configuration, designed everything but the chips themselves, and build and maintain it all. (Good job security, too, as nobody else understands the whole system.)
Jon