The Juicero juice machine. Check out a tear down that AvE did.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Cp-BGQfpHQ</a>
HP calculators, back in the day. I've heard stories (perhaps apocryphal) of one that was run over by a car and still worked. Even if that one story isn't true, they were <i>solid</i>.
All traffic lights but especially the ones set to do rolling green lights. The rolling green lights assume someone’s going the speed limit (which no one does) so it introduces more stop-and-go than if they all switched at the same time! But traffic lights on their own are all optimized for the peak 20 min of traffic instead of the other 24 hours. They really don’t make sense outside of peak.
An IT ticketing system that had a disaster recovery solution inclusive of DB failover, load-balancing, etc. all to another data center in another time zone.<p>Some medium critical business systems didn't have that so if a disaster struck, that stupid ticketing system would fail over and be up. I guess so they could put tickets in for all the other systems that didn't make it?<p>I think this was borne out of one of those "use it or lose it" budget scenarios that happens in big companies at the end of a fiscal year.
My lecturers used to talk about the over engineering of chemical plants in the USSR. It was something to do with the command economy that meant the engineers over engineered the plants<p>Then there was Chernobyl...
US government, (might apply to others). They do so much paperwork and analysis to ensure no nickel is misspent. The cost to protect a nickel seems to be about a dollar.