I have seen this argument > Let's look at Puppet as an example. Let's say you have an organization that has a couple people out of a dozen that can write shell

I have seen this argument > Let's look at Puppet as an example. Let's say you have an organization that has a couple people out of a dozen that can write shell scripts that aren't spaghetti. But if everything depends on them they become a bottleneck. You know there's a bunch of halfway decent modules written out there for a lot of stuff you need and your two people can close the gap. The rest of the team can build knowledge and skill over time but can start putting modules together to build infrastructure today. So you can choose shell scripts and fixing your personnel/skill issues or you can choose Puppet and deal with the warts. Training or hiring new people would be obvious but given the reality of budget and politics at $bigcorp it's a no-go or you're looking at years of effort. Even if it's cut and dry technically it's really not always a simple decision. at least 5 different times and each time whoever argued that point ended up being wrong 3 months down the line. What I don't get is why it keeps being propagated. You should indeed take those 2 people, make them a bottleneck, and let them build the organizational tools and expertise around what they consider is correct instead of doing what you suggested. I think this argument is propagated because it provides the illusion that programmers are interchangeable. If somehow you can leverage all the Puppet knowledge in the world you will reduce your risk and dependence on single points of failure like one programmer that understands how the tower of shell scripts fit together. I think this is based on a false premise. Programmers are not interchangeable and no matter how many frameworks and tools you layer on it will not be possible to get rid of the dependence of good programmers doing what is right from a technical standpoint. The alternative just doesn't make sense really. You can't take a bunch of idiots and make them brilliant through tooling.