I don't know if the article is a helpful answer to the question, but it's a very true answer I think.

My path to 'doing' systems engineering for a time (it really wasn't my thing) was by maintaining software an actual sys. eng. had written, fixing problems with it, extending it and eventually becoming responsible for it.

Best lol - API of a library we were using changed so that instead of taking a pointer to a struct to allocate memory for, it just wanted an amount of memory to allocate. We didn't notice, it passed all our tests (sheer luck) and dumped core on prod all day long. Funny.