Salaries, ranked by 27 percent as the No. 1 issue.

Technical obsolescence, 22.5 percent.

Age discrimination, 15 percent.

Education (retraining, updating), 11 percent.

Trailing behind those were professional ethics (4.6 percent) ; pensions (3.8 percent); engineers' image (3.6 percent); affirmative action/diversity (3.3 percent) and patent rights (0.8 percent).

In the 1995 salary survey, one-third of the 921 respondents told us they access the Internet daily. About 36 percent ignored the Internet altogether. But this year, only 8.3 percent of the U.S. respondents said they do not have access to the Internet-EEs have adopted the Net as a design and workplace tool. But are they looking for jobs over the Internet? Yes-but.

Yes, say 31 percent of our 891 American EEs. They have scanned both company and employment-only Web sites for jobs. But, only 5.5 percent of those 32 percent actually located positions via the Web.

Is that good? No one really knows.

Bruce Moore, vice president at Bernard Hodes Advertising, operators of the multicareer site CareerMosaic, admits, "It's hard for us to tell" how many people get jobs through Internet listings. Emp loyers who list jobs on the CareerMosaic site receive resumes directly from the users, so that itis difficult for Hodes to track the outcome. CareerMosaic's job ends once that resume hits the client company's server.

However, there is no doubt about the tremendous boom in listings and use of the Internet in recruitment. Tens of thousands of users visit job sites. A new site, called HotJobs, that lists only technical and information-systems people, tallied 25,000 hits over two days.

Moore calls Internet recruitment a worldwide phenomenon. CareerMosaic was posted in Japan this June, and traffic shot up 50 percent at the site in a month.

Our survey in Japan confirms that engineers there have embraced the Net, though not necessarily as an employment vehicle. Two-thirds of the 445 Japanese respondents used the Net, and more than 6 percent of the cybersearchers looked for new jobs.

Policy change

That 6.4 percent is understandable, si nce two-thirds have never held another job. Once bastions of lifetime employment, Japanese companies have slowly been diluting that policy, with both outright and formerly unheard-of layoffs or through "reassignments." At the very large conglomerates, an EE can conceivably end up being moved to a nonengineering job outside his or her field, and out of the promotion loop.

Such developments may contribute to the higher dissatisfaction rate of Japanese engineers over Americans.

We asked our readers to tell us what's happening at their workplaces. Their report back to us: hang on tight.

More than one-third said their employers bought another company in the past few months, but only 10 percent said their company was sold. Another 6 percent said their company is on the block.

More than 28 percent said new divisions have been added, while 18 percent reported divisions being sold off. But since we allowed multiple answers, a respondent coul d have experienced both additions and subtractions in the same year.

More than 40 percent saw downsizing in the past year; however, only 22 percent checked off "layoffs at my immediate workplace," a giant improvement over past years: it's half the 44 percent of 1993. That suggests that while employers continued to adjust their staffing levels, they were leaving the engineering workforce alone. And one-third report that their employers have boosted hiring, up from 27 percent in 1995.

However, companies are not quite as expansive as last year in adding new product development. In 1995, with the recovery in full steam, 36 percent of the employers added product-development programs. That slipped a bit in 1996, as 28 percent of respondents saw new projects added. Possible reasons for the reduction: a general cooldown in semiconductors and PCs, and more difficulty in finding the right people. As reported earlier, 42 percent say projects were delayed or put on hold due to lack of people.

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