The great part of “systems engineering” is that the fundamentals have not changed in the last like 30-40 years. If you have a basic university undergrad level understanding of operating systems you can work up from the fundamentals to understand what is going on and your knowledge will probably never go out of date in your career.

It definitely isn’t for everyone and you need to be very persistent, but I enjoy not having to relearn tech stacks every 4 years and job security for Wizards tends to be quite good. The downside is you can spend 80+ hours tracking down a bug that results in a one line change (don’t ask me how I know).