Yea there is a balance between giving engineers power to effectively do their jobs and limiting the amount of damage they can do. You can put up more guard rail

Yea there is a balance between giving engineers power to effectively do their jobs and limiting the amount of damage they can do. You can put up more guard rails for engineers, but it will most likely make it harder to do their job or deal with production emergencies. What is also tough is if you have a group of highly privileged engineers who can manage not having guard rails except for a few cowboys who cause problems. You can limit the capabilities of the entire group to deal with the cowboys, but then you are making all of the responsible engineers less effective. One solution is to move the cowboys to a position where they can do less damage, another is to make the cowboys responsible for their repeat offences, or you can just go full up blameless and have to deal with outages caused by repeat offenders. I have seen this in action at my org — we basically have a chaos monkey who is a person. They cause an outage and not even a week later they are doing dumb/overly risky actions again.