Second. I am a competent programmer who degrades himself in the drudgery of business rules and visual ETL (DataStage, Informatica, etc.) and I do it only for th

Second. I am a competent programmer who degrades himself in the drudgery of business rules and visual ETL (DataStage, Informatica, etc.) and I do it only for the money. So many of the problems are trivially solved with small programs, or even gasp just plain SQL. I concede there are features delivered by these fancy ETL tools beyond the quick (but not dirty) of custom solutions, but the overheads are higher too and I believe a cost-benefit analysis would invalidate the supposed business cases for using these tools. This is not not-invented-here syndrome. This is simpler and cheaper. The problem for my case often is previous attempts to do it ourselves are shit. That's not a problem with the technology. :P Behind the scenes I've solved hundreds of problems - one-off or on-going, small and large - by writing custom applications. This is the real increase in productivity that justifies my fee.