&gt; The stuff I had built at my first job taught me that my intuitions about software systems in general were mostly correct<p>Oh boy. Here we go.<p>&gt; The guy that had built this part was pretty smart .. He probably should have trusted his intuitions a bit more and not bowed to peer pressure<p>Or maybe he knew enough to understand how Puppet could fit into the overall architecture and strategy at this company that is now the second company you&#x27;ve ever worked for.<p>&gt; Why the fuck are build&#x2F;ops folks making decisions about how the application should be deployed and configured?<p>Because that&#x27;s what build&#x2F;ops folks are there to do, and congratulations, you&#x27;ve just discovered dev ops. Not every application is nginx, node.js, and mongodb running on a single VM. Sometimes deployments get complicated.<p>&gt; How is it that these things are obvious to me but not obvious to others?<p>Wow.<p>This person hates on Puppet for &quot;reasons&quot; and decries all configuration management tools as awful pieces of garbage, then says Chef is great while consistently asserting that people are sheep for using configuration management tools, then throws in digs at Ansible and Salt with absolutely no context. It seems like he&#x2F;she extrapolated one bad example of one Puppet use case into a general flaw with the whole lot. It&#x27;s like he&#x2F;she drove a Pinto for a bit, had trouble going around one corner one time, and deduces that all motor vehicles are bad and anyone who drives a car is an idiot.