Jim Cox, a design-for-test engineer who worked at Texas Instruments and Motorola for 20 years, had jumped to a higher-paying job at Synopsys to define a test integration tool. He was laid off March 5, 2002.

After being out of work for seven months, he landed a job in early November in computer networking at Fort Hood, 50 miles north of his home.

"I'm now the government guy working with a bunch of contractors," Cox reported happily.

With few test engineering jobs to apply for this year, Cox filled some time by taking a correspondence course to learn to inspect houses as part of the real-estate sales process.

The 200-hour course was "pretty easy, but I learned a lot about the building and electric codes. I printed up 850 business cards, so I might as well use what I learned, doing inspections as a side job on the weekends," Cox said.

The Department of Defense job pays about half of what he earned as a test engineer, said Cox, now 54, and he doubted if many EE test jobs will come along for a man of his age.

"The DFT function is getting embedded into the design tools, and pretty soon it will be so easy for the designers to do their own scan insertion," Cox said.

Manish Bakshi, who holds bachelor's and master's degrees in engineering from Washington University, was laid off from Cisco in July 2001. His expertise at device drivers and real-time operating systems has provided him with several contract engineering jobs. One contract at OmegaBand resulted in a full-time job, but three months later, the Infiniband systems startup shut down, in October.

A headhunter quickly found him another contracting job, doing an embedded Linux installation.

"Contract work is very stressful," Bakshi said. "They want immediate results in return for a certain amount of money. And my skills are not rising."

The past 16 months have been tough. His wife gave birth to their daughter Kayshavi two months ago and instead of taking her three-month maternity leave, she went back to work last month.

To take care of the baby and their 5-year-old son, his mother-in-law has moved from Houston to help out.

"I'm hoping the industry will pick up. It's been almost two years now, and I'm barely staying above water."

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