I used to work at a small company whose main business was building waterjet cutting machines. My job was maintaining the software used to mark bad spots on leather hides and placing cutting patterns on them. (Unfortunately, I spent most of my time trying to come up with a better way of placing cutting patterns on hides which involved a lot of computational geometry and basically went way over my head. Well either that, or it was just a really tough problem.)

I got the job kind of by chance, I put out an ad in a local newspaper that basically said "programmer / sysadmin looking for work".

If you want to learn C/C++, trying to look at and understand some of the open source code floating around might be a good starting point, since there is a lot of it. Pick up some project you find interesting and try to make a few modifications. Alternatively, try building a simple project of your own and take it from there.

C has its fair share of problems, and one needs to be aware of them, but it can also be a very fun language. I cannot say much about C++ either way, I find it a bit intimidating, but that's just me.

(Of course, if you are interested in lower-level languages, Rust is getting a lot of attention these days... it claims to offer much of the performance of C/C++ while avoiding most of their problems. I have not looked at it myself, though.)