There's plenty of low level details engineers in other disciplines aren't expected to understand. A lot of Engineering is built around models of the world that

There's plenty of low level details engineers in other disciplines aren't expected to understand. A lot of Engineering is built around models of the world that describe physical behavior. Usually the equations we use are simplified and contain a lot of subtleties when you dig into them. In fluid dynamics for example the Navier–Stokes equations are infamous because we don't understand all the theory behind why they work. They are used all the time despite not being fully understood. Semiconductor behavior is another area, the Band Gap models used to describe them incorporates a lot of quantum physics nuances involving Fermi–Dirac Statistics and wave functions and the like. At some point when you do work in Engineering you are "high enough" up in the stack you can use simplified abstractions and trust that what is underneath is acceptable. From what I've seen software engineer has these abstractions as well, process switching sounds like one of these cases.