I have been campaigning for this for years, ever since I was thrown out of a well-known UK - now Japanese - computer company, when I was already over 50, and found myself unable to find a steady job. Fifteen years later, I am still looking.

However, I am having second thoughts about the ageism campaign. I've come to the reluctant and heartless conclusion that most of the IT males above 35 holding down steady jobs are already brain-dead, and do not deserve to stay in the work-force. Women, on the other hand, get better as they grow older. Browsing around the bulletin boards, I forecast that the teenage nerds I find there will also have run out of steam in 10 years.

Whether the percentage of brain-dead males in the IT industry is 80 per cent or 95 per cent, I am not sure. But anyway, personnel directors are quite right to fire them at 35. Where personnel directors - a pretty brain-dead lot themselves - get it wrong, however, is that they cannot discriminate between the dead and the living. By the living, I mean the minority who gobble up new technologies at any age, and who grow as they get older.

In fact, the personnel directors tend to fire the living first, because the living tend to be mavericks and trouble-makers. The result is most large companies are full of brain-dead male apparatchiks, aged 45, keeping their heads down. A sure recipe for corporate decay.

What I have found among my contemporaries, who are still punching their weight in IT, is that they go on for ever, contributing 10 times more at 55, 65 or 70 than most 30-year-olds. Age does not wither them.

If the personnel directors could manage the trick of picking the few immortals from the lumpen mass, they would end up with a much more creative workforce. They would also find out a few other practical and financial benefits of employing oldies.

After the age of 50, most people are through the time- and emotion-consuming business of child-rearing. Mothers (and fathers) can return to work. They can concentrate on business. They can travel. Both spouses are working, so individuallly they do not need to be paid as much. They have lost any illusion that they are going to be managing directors, and so can concentrate on the job they are doing.

By 60, they have probably paid off their mortgage, and need even less money. Senior citizen rail cards give them the freedom to move.

But 65 is the real turning point. Bus passes mean that you can travel free, at least in London, and this releases tremendous energy and drive. National Insurance payments stop, and you actually receive a pension from the state and from previous employers. All your energies can go into your job, for the first time in your life. You feel 25 again.

The way the IT industry has developed increases the illusion of youth. Twenty years ago the industry was boring - just maths, engineering or payrolls. It was great to get away. Now it embraces art, music, literature, gardening and most of the pursuits pursued by wrinklies.

Most important for you and for your employer, however, is that you are not dependent on them, and your boss isn't running scared that you will pinch the job. S/he gets the benefit of your unvarnished advice. If the boss is too dumb to accept it, you don't give a damn, because you can give him the two fingers, go off to Cornwall or somewhere, and live happily ever after.