imagine a network engineering culture where the concept of 'attempt to deviate' just does not occur.
Are you trying to suggest that this is something horrible, or that it's the future of network engineering? :)
The model of network engineering that grew up during the 1990s is forever gone unless you work in a smaller organization where people have to wear many hats. In the big ISPs, now identical to the big telcos, operations and engineering design duties are separated. The operations folks do not deviate from the written plans that they work with. If the slightest thing happens that is not in the plan, they rollback the changes as specified in the plan. They don't fix anything unless it is officially broken with trouble tickets filed and escalations up to senior management. That is about the only time that operations people can get away with taking shortcuts and creative solutions. On the other hand, the engineering design folks should spend a good part of their day trying out things, thinking up new ideas, poking around equipment and software to see how far it can be pushed. Then, when they have learned something and are ready to implement it in the network, they write a detailed plan for operations. Then some other engineering folks test the heck out of that design to try and find fault with it. After all the faults are fixed, it goes to operations and the engineering design folks move on to something else unless serious problems occur and operations needs a design engineer to approve some sensible action to be taken. The operations folk can't take the sensible action because that would deviate from their plans, but getting engineering design folks involved, gives them an out for real emergencies. So the term "network engineering" is ambiguous because a lot of people use it to mean the 90's style job where engineering design activity and operational activity were all jumbled together. In some companies, taking the engineering design track not only means that you lose enable on the routers, but you lose all TACACS access and have to get authorisation from a VP just to ask for a copy of the running config on a production router. Some people like ops because they see a lot of stuff go by and learn from it, get their CCIE and move into design engineering. Others like ops because they are scared of the responsibility for thinking up what to do next, and making a mistake. As far as I can see, the only way to get a job that mixes ops and design is to be in 3rd or 4th level support which is the top of the technical escalation chain where a few excellent design engineers do have enable on the routers because they fix important problems in near realtime. I suspect that it would be advantageous to have a career in which you worked for a while in ops before moving into design engineering if you want to get into top-level support. Take all this with a grain of salt. Every company does things a bit different, and the terminology that is used is ambiguous. It would be interesting to see what others have to say about this answer. --Michael Dillon