Based on my own experiences and the experience of others, I would say yes. While it is not a genetic requirement that you are a packrat prior to entering to the IT field, but it certainly helps! Ours is field where old and new technologies intermingle on a daily basis. You might have to support machines that are based technologies that are 10+ years old and yet, at the same time, start preparing for the next generation. We are in a dilemma – just as we have space limitations on a hard-drive, we have space limitations at the office where we can store manuals for older programs, hardware pieces, print-outs from magazines (or entire collections of IT magazines – would be kind of fun to go back and look at a computer shopper from15 years ago and look at the ads from Northgate and Swan computers – now all long gone).
It is not that we are predisposed to “collecting and hoarding” – it is just that we end up doing such, in many cases, out of necessity. Now what is it that we accumulate? In a lot cases it is odd bits of hardware that might prove useful in the future. These could be left over pieces from a project, specialty screws and nuts, or the collection of mice and Ethernet cables that seem to multiple on their accord, when left alone. We are also prone to collect “documentation” over the years that are germane to our current working environment (that we also end up carrying with us to new jobs, “just in case”). Documentation is used broadly here – this could be books, magazines, print outs from magazine and everyone seems to have a pile of TechNet articles stashed on the corner of their desk. I have saved the best for last. How many of you have disks for Operating Systems (or applications) that have long since retired or better yet – have install Floppies (yes, that’s right, floppies- the 5 ¼ variety!) that are so old they are eligible to vote.
In many situations this proved to be a boon – especially when you needed an old driver, odd piece of hardware or to run an antiquated program to access an even more archaic document. I was helping out a charitable organization that I belong to that still used a DOS database – they weren’t interested in changing, because, as the elderly gentleman who ran the program said “it works”. The only reason they changed programs was that their old 386 machine finally died. But this is a rare situation. We keep this stuff around because we “might” need it – and in fact there are many situations where we do – but sometimes I think we keep all this stuff around – well, just because!
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