systems engineering... is about curiosity. Asking how then why. AND Then knowledge+ability to build/tweak/fix/do-something-about the Thing. Not just observe. Whether the domain is software or mechanics or rocket science or group-psychology or (usualy) many of them together.. it's still same. Just takes time and accumulation of lots of rather-unconnected-unrelated-irrelevant little bits.
When i hire, i look for DIY skills. Tinkering with stuff. Repairing broken pens, toys, door-frames, or UIs. That has proven to be the only relevant signal. Lots of people can apply formulas. Few question them. Seems Rare skill nowadays.
Maybe because i'm DIY reverse-engineer-everything guy myself. You know, people hire their similars :)
Doesn't have to be curiosity, it also works with stubbornness. If you have the opinion that it "should ought to" work a certain way, and the system disagrees, then you will naturally have to dig into it, because you'll create your own breakage. :)
I honestly don't give a damn how my system works, so long as it works. It's just that the way I use it tends to make that a very temporary state of affairs.
It doesn't particularly matter how you come by the library of a thousand mostly useless low-level factoids about the system. So long as it accumulates, and you keep having to make use of it to work around the problems you yourself caused a few days prior, you won't be able to avoid becoming a systems person.
When i hire, i look for DIY skills. Tinkering with stuff. Repairing broken pens, toys, door-frames, or UIs. That has proven to be the only relevant signal. Lots of people can apply formulas. Few question them. Seems Rare skill nowadays.
Maybe because i'm DIY reverse-engineer-everything guy myself. You know, people hire their similars :)
offtopic: some very-old DIY things of mine: https://svilendobrev.com/napravisam/
pff, maybe i need to make a separate chapter on handles and hooks and such, i have (re)build dozens..
have fun