I met him through a common low-level interest. As said, I didn't even know, nor actually care, what he was working. Our correspondence was purely a hobby project thing, until he asked whether I would be interested in a topic-adjacent internship.
If you're dreading enterprise software, kernel engineering is (usually at least) definitely pretty far from that. I would say you have to have a knack for it, since among other things you'll be dealing with problems that, for "higher level" engineering, are usually already solved on some lower layers, and also because debugging is often an exercise in creativity and knowing (and learning, ad-hoc) a meticulous amount of details. Being passionate about that certainly helps. But absolutely try it out for yourself, maybe it's your cup of tea and you just didn't know it yet.
If you're dreading enterprise software, kernel engineering is (usually at least) definitely pretty far from that. I would say you have to have a knack for it, since among other things you'll be dealing with problems that, for "higher level" engineering, are usually already solved on some lower layers, and also because debugging is often an exercise in creativity and knowing (and learning, ad-hoc) a meticulous amount of details. Being passionate about that certainly helps. But absolutely try it out for yourself, maybe it's your cup of tea and you just didn't know it yet.