For me, working as a software dev, it was when my boss recommending we use a search engine to improve the performance of our OLTP application/system (The application didn't even have any search functionality, I shit you not). I pushed back against this, telling him using a search engine made no sense for our use case, but rather we should follow traditional scalability and performance tuning approaches for read heavy OLTP Systems/Relational Databases (read replicas, horizontal partitioning, query tuning, etc..). His response was none of what I said was right, commenting that there was no literature on the topic (even though there are hundreds of system design books, articles, and websites on PRECISELY this topic).
The boss/company ignored me and spent a year having two principle engineers try to implement their search engine approach. It failed miserably, and after having wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars on the project, they ended up adding read replicas and query tuning to fix things after hiring a semi competent software architect.
The crazy thing, this is a company worth tens of millions of dollars.
My boss was also probably making 3-5x my total compensation, which makes me very sad.