<TD WIDTH=460 ><B><FONT COLOR="#EE3300">Being old doesn't make you any better at your job, but it shortens the odds. Self-confessed wrinkly, <a href="mailto:rsarson@cix.compulink.co.uk">Richard Sarson</a>, has a go at short-sighted personnel managers</b>
</font>
<br>
Ageism is in the news again, as the wrinklies' lobby tries to
get a commitment from the Labour Party to make upper age-limits
on job ads illegal.
<P>
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.
<P>
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.
<P>
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.
<P>
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.
<P>
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.
<P>
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.
<P>
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.
<P>
By 60, they have probably paid off their mortgage, and need even
less money. Senior citizen rail cards give them the freedom to
move.
<P>
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.
<P>
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.
<P>
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.
<P>
Can you see personnel directors accepting these reasons for employing
