It's also a hell of a lot of fun... which is why it's not really what you get paid for. What you get paid for is the long, tedious slog of the real world: maintaining existing business logic, teasing out user requirements in a domain you don't really understand, dealing with other developers who have different preferences and skill levels, doing variations of the same thing instead of exploring new domains and technologies. You spend a lot of days in meetings that should have been emails.

It's not all drudgery, and it's both more fun and better paid than 99% of the jobs in the world, but it's not picking the wondrous low-hanging fruit that you did in college.