Another anecdote... My experience with older programmers and sys admins is that the vast majority of them know a lot about how a computer works (as you mentione

Another anecdote... My experience with older programmers and sys admins is that the vast majority of them know a lot about how a computer works (as you mentioned) but many also haven't kept up to date on tools available to simplify and automate processes. This leads to unnecessarily convoluted and confusing configurations that are far from optimised considering todays available tooling. This frustrates me to no end as it creates a load of needless busy work which at the same time makes the dev/admin feel both smart and productive whilst not optimising for what the business actually cares about.