Well, in the last couple of years, engineers in Europe have joined those "star" employees that are regularly getting headhunted. Equally regularly, headhunters with the freedom to offer big jumps in salary to their prospective hires are having to tell companies that they can't find the kind of people they want-young, flexible, experienced and supremely capable.

"Five or six years ago engineers had to do a lot to get into a job. Well, that's all turned around now," said Anton Van Rossum, managing director of IR Search (Nijmegen, the Netherlands). Van Rossum's company (www.ir_search.com) specializes in finding engineers for chip design and chip making across Europe working particularly in the Netherlands, France and Switzerland.

"Now it's very difficult for the companies to get the people they want. There is a lot going on for engineers, especially if they are specialized. We are able to double some people's salary," he observes.

Van Rossum said that while all areas of chip and systems design and semiconductor making are enjoying prolonged boom conditions, the wireless area for 3G [third generation] and 4G development is the hottest. It's an assessment with which Adam Watts, managing partner of Alphatec Recruitment (Liverpool, England) agrees.

"Definitely; in wireless and communications generally salaries are going up. We now seeing offers of British Sterling 60,000 [about $90,000] with all sorts of benefits. That sort of money used to be reserved for sales and marketing positions or even for members of the board."

In Europe there's a combination of both a general economic and a more specific electronics boom, coupled with a static or falling supply of graduates in technical subjects. That has helped existing engineers drive up their salaries over the last couple of years.

Four years ago, a typical design engineer's annual wage in the U.K. might have been British Sterling 25,000 to British Sterling 30,000 which equates in today's dollar terms to about $37,000 to $45,000. While there are still plenty of recruitment ads offering similar annual salaries, the highest offers are more than doubling that. In certain key areas

European design engineers are being offered salaries equivalent to $120,000 together with stock options.

"First the companies raised the salaries-that you can see from the job advertisements. Then they had to put more effort into finding the right people. That's because the biggest obstacle to growth right now is finding the right people," said van Rossum.

Indeed, some companies are being limited by their success. "There are startups in Europe that have been increasing their engineering head count by 25 percent for two or three years. The first years were fine when they needed ones and twos and even ten engineers, but you suddenly find you need 50 people to meet the plan. It's just not possible."

One result, according to van Rossum, is that design engineers are starting to flex their economic muscles in the marketplace. "Engineers are becoming more prima donna-ish. They are laying down conditions and they are being met," he said.

These conditions could vary from a four-day week for one, to exceptional hours to ease child-care for another, to being supported while working from home, even to the purchase of the engineer's preferred EDA tools.

"Engineers are saying: "I expect this and that to be better. I need these tools." And they are getting it," said van Rossum.

According to Alphatec's Watts, a job market that was already in the job seeker's favor a year ago has certainly improved further.

"It's a different market. Now everybody is looking for peo-ple. We're getting buy-back offers now. That is, an engineer who has been offered a job elsewhere will be given a higher offer by his or her employer to try and keep them. It used to happen at management levels but not for engineers. And shares are being offered, especially pre-IPO shares and lots of engineers want them," said Watts. This is despite the fact that share options are heavily taxed in Europe on the assumption that they are perks for already handsomely paid company directors.

Robin Saxby, chairman president and chief executive officer of ARM Holdings plc, has guided the company since 1990, when it was a dozen engineers and known as Advanced RISC Machines Ltd. He also did something more or less unprecedented at the time in spreading share options very broadly to everyone in the company. Saxby has been lobbying the U.K. government to reduce the tax rate on share options so as to recognize their role as a primary reward for wealth creation, although so far to no effect.

However, notwithstanding Saxby's efforts with the U.K. government, Alphatec's Watts explained that in the U.K. there has been a relatively sudden rise of a startup culture, particularly following the flotation of ARM in 1998, and that this has started to change the traditional engineering career path.

Engineers used to want to join a well-established company because they would have the best projects, the best tools, and they would tend to stay there for a long period of time-even their whole careers.

Now engineers may start with an established company, one that is prepared to help them train and get some experience, but many of them will quickly want to move to a pre-IPO startup. "If the startup succeeds, they will make a fortune quickly and even if it fails, such is the job market, they could walk into another company and name their price," said Watts.

According to Watts, continental Europe is lagging a little behind the U.K. in this entrepreneurial change-over but the startup culture is starting to catch on there too.

The recruitment of an analog front-end design team by Element 14 Ltd. (Cambridge, England) may provide an example of the way the entrepreneurial model is spreading from U.K. to continental Europe.

Earlier this year Element14 (www.e-14.com), a pre-IPO start-up born out of the ashes of Acorn Computer Ltd., recruited a design team from Alcatel-Bell NV and planned to set them up as the company's DSL (digital subscriber loop) design team in Mechelen, Belgium. Although Alcatel is the typical big company employer, they probably tried to retain the engineering team with salary offers. But the one thing they could not offer was the prospect of pre-IPO stock-options that might be worth millions one day soon.

For the moment, as Europe evolves into a more entrepreneurial culture, the engineer's position is strong. As a result there has been no erosion of the traditional European benefit of long holidays. Retirement packages, however, traditionally organized on a company-wide basis and highly favorable to employees, are fast being converted into the U.S. model of self-provision.

"The startups don't offer much by way of pensions. But then again the young kids taking the jobs don't give a damn about pensions, they think their stock options are going to be their pension," said Watts.

Van Rossum said Europe is becoming more like the United States in offering engineers a choice between a more measured approach at a traditional vertically integrated market leader such as Philips, Ericsson, Siemens or Alcatel; or a more risky but potentially better paid roller-coaster ride at a startup.

"There are some people who choose a life of working hard and making lots of money quickly, and some choose a different environment where there is a balance between home life and work," said van Rossum. "For example, at Ericsson you get 38 days' holiday. That's why not everyone is interested in joining a startup company."

Van Rossum argues that European holiday entitlements will never be reduced from the typical 24 or 30 days plus statutory holidays that are the norm. "That's the European way," he said. "In the United States some people only get 10 days. That's never going to happen here. People have grown used to it."

However, he does acknowledge that in a startup people are task-driven and don't always get to take their holidays, no matter what the policy is.