Other times, it's someone new to the team|company|career who's given a task that directly impacts my area of the app, and they go off and build some monstrously over engineered solution to a not difficult problem, without asking for client (ie my) input. Once had to work with a guy who would implement plugins for the build system for trivial stuff for example.
One that stands out is a guy (experienced, 10 year+) who was hired on to implement a one off for a client such that he was able to re-use a lot of existing code. He systematically went though and cut and paste entire source tree's into a new project. This time, I threw caution to the wind; "don't do that, package it and use it as a library!", no effect. A couple of months later the same guy comes to me with a bunch of bugs related to hard coded paths in the code he'd moved, but hadn't updated the paths. Oh I was a jackass; told ya so, didn't listen did ya?
I have struggled with this over the years. I have tried to be super diplomatic and circumspect. I have tried staying silent, I have tried talking to leads and managers. Here's the thing: nothing works. I have come to believe there is something in the DNA of (some) developers that prohibits asking for or taking advice.
> myself was once in a situation where I thought myself a star team member only to find out later that I was not helping much, and that is putting it mildly. I wasted 12-18 months before I figured this out and moved on.
This is incredibly self aware, and I congratulate you. I believe most developers achieve this after some period of time in the industry, but some never do.
Edit; added a bunch of stuff, this is a sore point for me apparently.