"In 1999 and 2000, if candidates could write down the right buzzwords and hold a conversation, they would get a job. Within a week, they would have five interviews, and by the next week they would have three job offers," said Cole, who works for International Data Search (Austin, Texas), which specializes in hardware and firmware engineers.

Things took a nasty twist in February 2001, when Motorola laid off 4,000 people. According to Cole, 70 to 80 percent were engineers, as Motorola shut down IC development groups en masse. That layoff included a large number of very talented engineers, she said, with their own network of contacts. Over the past 15 months, nearly all of them have managed to find good jobs.

More recently, she said, companies that are hiring have started to take closer looks at people with Motorola on their resume. "What we are hearing from other companies is that they are not as enthusiastic about hiring Motorola engineers now as they used to be, because Motorola engineers are not dealing with complex-enough technology," Cole said.

Analog design engineers as well as people with skills in wireless networking have never had any trouble finding work. And starting this past February, things got markedly better "all of a sudden," said Cole.

Conexant began hiring in Austin, looking for engineers for an HDTV set-top-box chip development project. A wide range of small to mid-size companies began looking for engineers, though about half wanted the candidates to relocate.

But the huge layoffs in Dallas and other telecom centers have made it tough for digital ASIC designers. The telecom slump, plus the dot-com meltdown, have made it hard for C++ and Java programmers, she said. (So much for the shortage of embedded software engineers.)

"The hiring process is getting shorter. At the bottom, a company that had 10 requirements for a candidate wanted them to have 70 percent of the requirements. Even then, the result was usually 'No.' Now, they usually want to talk to candidates that meet their basic requirements, and there aren't so many arbitrary shifts. Companies are still picky, but a year ago they were very unrealistic."

Despite the upbeat signs, hiring won't really bounce back until the telecom sector does, Cole predicted.

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