The coolest, most technically challenging code I ever worked on was sheer idiocy that added immense risk to the business. It was back in the dotcom days. If one of my own employees proposed the same kind of thing today, I'd threaten semi-seriously to fire them on the spot, and I'd flatly prohibit them from wasting man-months of effort on something we could buy off the shelf. Then again, management paying no attention to what the engineers were doing was pretty stupid, too.