Destroyer engine rooms under heavy fire

Why would anyone choose to serve as an engineer in a destroyer's machinery spaces?

For a technically minded sailor, naval engineering was a good and unusually interesting job for its time despite the noise and danger.

A heavy battleship shell could pass through a destroyer's thin hull and detonate beyond it unless dense machinery supplied enough resistance. A hit on a turbine, gearbox, or boiler could still be catastrophic. Engineering crews worked below deck amid noise, dirt, superheated steam, and machinery that was itself dangerous under pressure. They might know little about damage elsewhere until the ship was already sinking. That danger prompts a direct question about why anyone would choose the work. The answer is that naval engineering offered a technically minded sailor a good and unusually interesting job by the standards of the period.