[bananas]

This. Most of the code I write is gluing stuff together rather than inventing new things which is what I'm paid to do.

A lot of people say this stifles creativity and is boring but the productivity is off the scale. I've built things that would cost £50000+ in dev time and licenses and take 3 months in .net in a couple of days in Java without spending a penny (reporting, messaging, email processing, document scanning, parsing, bulk processing, ETL, matching, logging). This is because someone already did the leg work and released it with an open source license meaning no license cost. Not only that, the ecosystem, Unix based deployment platforms are all easy to automate so jobs only get done once and stay working. Sure you can throw out an ASP.Net MVC web app quickly but that's the easy bit.

We can put £500,000 a year back into open source projects through time investment and donations if we replace .Net and still do better than break even on the dev cost.