At some point of their careers, most engineers are asked to make architectural decisions or at least propose some solutions for business requirements.
In such situations, thinking like an architect is crucial to achieve the business objective of the requirement but unfortunately there are mistakes which many engineers make when they don’t shift their thinking from engineer to architect.
Engineers focus on making it work somehow.
Architects focus on achieving business goals.
Engineering rewards deep dives to the technical concepts.
If you deeply understand BGP, STP, MPLS, Firewall traffic flow; you are valuable as an engineer.
And yes, strong technical knowledge is essential but an architecture is about;
- Trade-offs
- Constraints
- Competing priorities
- Risk distribution
- Business Impact
Knowing how something works is engineering.
Knowing when and whether to use it is architecture.
This mistake alone can add unnecessary complexity casing high expenses, fragile network designs.
Mistake #2: Choosing the Technology they Love, Inbox Thinking
Engineers try to solve the problem with what they love doing. As an example, if someone loves Cisco technologies, will try to apply it everywhere even in areas where Cisco is not the strongest fit, where the business cannot afford it, or where better alternatives exist.
Architecture is not about personal preference.
It is about selecting what best fits the business need, budget, operational model, and long-term sustainability.
Loyalty to technology should never override alignment with business reality.
Mistake #3: Solving Local Problems instead of Systematic Weaknesses
Engineers are trained to fix what breaks.
- Link flapping? Adjust timers
- High CPU? Tune processes
- Security Alert? Add a rule
Architectural thinking asks what decision made it happen, what is the blast radius and how to shrink it if happens again, what can be introduced to make the user experience better even that happens etc.
Engineers fix symptoms, Architects redesign boundaries.
Mistake #4: Optimizing Components instead of Balancing the Whole System
Engineers love optimizations.
- Best convergence time
- Lowest Latency
- Maximum throughput
- Tightest Security Policy
But architecture is about the balance, not technical perfection which increases caveats.
Improving one area may;
- Increase operational complexity
- Increase failure probability
- Increase troubleshooting time
- Increase dependencies on specific experts
If you optimize without evaluating trade-offs, you are still thinking like an Engineer..
In large campus networks with many switches and redundant links, availability is often monitored from a NOC.
RSTP converges very fast, which is technically superior.
But because it converges so quickly, the NMS may not detect the link failure.
No alarm triggers at 2:00 AM.
The on-shift engineer continues sleeping.
No one realizes a redundant link is already down.
The network appears healthy, but its resiliency is reduced.
Architecture considers monitoring systems, operational workflows, and human behaviour; not just protocol performance.
Mistake #5: Ignoring the Human System
Engineers like technological marvels. A design may be technically brilliant but if it is not designed for the people who are going to work with it, it's fragile.
Systems fail because of people more often than because of traffic.
Architectural thinking always includes the human layer where Engineers normally don't care.
The Real Shift
Engineers assume architecture is just larger-scale engineering, but it is not..
Engineering asks,
What to configure to achieve this?
Architecture asks,
What trade-offs am I choosing to achieve this?
When you shift your thinking from;
- From technical perfection to balance
- From technologies you love to technologies that fit
- From configuration to business experience
- From “somehow working” to “strategically aligned”
- From optimization to trade-offs
is where engineering ends and architecture begins..
So, Do you know any other mistakes which Engineers cause while they perform Architectural work?
