[JohnMakin]

It's not just junior engineers. Senior/management can fall into this trap as well.

At one of my former companies we had a small problem with whitelisting cloudflare IP's that don't typically change super duper often but definitely cannot be assumed to be static. My boss at that time decided the solution was this big initiative he called "whitelist maker" and assigned it to me. I don't remember what implementation details he wanted, but it was some insane rube-goldberg machine to basically pull down this list: https://www.cloudflare.com/ips-v4 and then put it into some terraform code.

I ended up quietly killing the project during a re-org and used the cloudflare provider, which conveniently provides the forementioned IPv4 list as a data source in 1 line of code. Done, 5 mins work. He had scheduled out an entire quarter and half of a team's resources for it.

[idkyall]

That's true, it's misleading to say this is a mistake only junior engineers make. Perhaps the real lesson is in having the maturity to put your ego aside and reflect clearly on whether you are solving the right problem in a sustainable way before jumping into the how.