Engineering Blindfolded

There’s a pattern I’ve been seeing more and more often, and it worries me.

An engineer hears about a new technology, whether it is SRv6, EVPN, SD-WAN, a “cloud-native” security platform, an automation framework, you name it. It’s modern, it’s powerful, it’s all over conference talks and vendor decks. A problem appears on the horizon: improve availability, reduce latency, increase security, “modernize the network,” and make things more “cloud-ready.”

And the first move is:
“Let’s use this tech!”

From that point on, everything becomes about justifying that choice. Architecture decks are written backwards from the decision. Diagrams bend to fit the tool. Risks are dismissed as “details we’ll iron out later.” The conversation becomes, “How do we make this stack work here?” instead of, “What is the right thing to do given what we know?”

That’s what I call engineering blindfolded.

You feel like you’re moving fast, and you’re using all the right buzzwords. You might even get praise early on for being “innovative.” But under the surface, you’re walking into complexity and risk with your eyes closed. And as your responsibilities grow, that way of working stops being just a technical problem; it becomes a career problem.

Because the real leverage in an engineering career is not how quickly you can name tools. It’s how clearly you can define the problem, reason from data, and design outcomes that work in the real world.

Let’s unpack the difference.