To restate my position using your terminology: I prefer programming (creating from scratch) to engineering (integrating) because the components that a software engineer has to work with are so often unusable. To repeat a rant from an HN comment of a few weeks ago: I am working on a system involving Jetty, Postgres, and a connection pool. The first two components are pretty solid, and there is no shortage of Java connection pools to choose from. But getting them to all play together defeated me. Documentation for Jetty and for the connection pools is just terrible, and highly version specific. The APIs keep wiggling around as the versions change. I finally gave up on doing things the "right" way (configuring everything in XML), and also gave up on integrating a connection pool. I wrote my own very simple one.