I agree with pp that mainframes is the issue. Ageism is probably not an issue if you have skills that are in demand. I work at Accenture and we hire 50 yr olds all the time - but they are mostly Indian men. I do have a counselee who is a 50 yr old single mom who got hired out of an MBA program - she went back to school after being laid off as a user of the enterprise software she now implements.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What part of "IT"

software testing, technical writer, business analyst, some configuration management, all mainframe based though....

Ah, I was wondering what the catch was. Someone with that much experience only on mainframes is a huge red flag. Part of the job of an IT person is to stay abreast of the latest technology. You don't need to be cutting edge, but your skills have to be some what recent.

I'm sure there are positions out there, but by not keeping current she's definitely narrowed the field.

As a technical hiring manager for a software dev project, I would say while ageism could be a problem so is skillset. Software skills change so rapidly that I have a hard time justfy paying a very sr person more than a midlevel dev. I've heard that software engineers start loosing value at 35 unless they find a niche or stay very current. If she is sporting C++ experience and no web or mobile tech I could see why she has a problem. That said maybe she has a niche and just needs to network more to exploit it.