Colour me jelly. Old school Unix guys are the kind of boomers I'd probably enjoy being around and ask stuff from.

The enterprise windows type IT guys just are something else, I'm sure there's real ones out there but in my experience they're basically an illiterate chatgpt integration for assorted "software vendors" that are usually only there because of internal cuts and are rinsing the company in broad daylight. They know very little about computers that their software vendors didn't teach them.

IMO automation is good when done well, but if anything I'd say half the problems at companies I've seen - including my own workplace - come from automating things that shouldn't be in some ugly way that inevitably breaks at the slightest change and that would work much better if there was just a person doing it manually instead. When automation becomes a demand from the bosses it becomes a metric and metrics become quotas and quotas are fulfilled as an end unto themselves in whatever (dumb) ways possible.