In Silicon Valley, select tech workers are in high demand

They have what it takes for the booming fields of social media, mobile software and cloud computing and juggle multiple job offers -- some in the six figures -- as they benefit from a tech job market that hasn't been this overheated since the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s. Internet giants like Google are competing with startups for increasingly rare talent: senior software engineers, data analysts, Web designers and application developers.

"If you can write code at a high level, you can write your own ticket," said Tom Silver, a vice president for the research job site Dice.com.

Just ask Kristal Pollack, a 29-year-old software engineer who programs what's known as the "back end" or innards of Internet-based services. Six companies were actively courting her when she started in April with Yammer, a social network for businesses.

Varma taught computer science for 10 years in India and came to the U.S. in 1995. Having worked for a smorgasbord of Web, networking and chip companies, he was drawn to SeaMicro by the prospect of "taking a totally new innovation to greater heights." Pollack, who has worked at IBM Almaden, a location-based advertising company and a solar company, is skilled in popular programming languages and is writing software that will allow Yammer to support large numbers of clients and applications. "I think of it as solving hard problems. How to do that in a creative way," she said.

Thanks in some cases to that competition, salaries for Silicon Valley tech professionals averaged $99,000 a year by late 2010, up near 3 percent from 2009 and 20 percent more than the national average, according to Dice.com. The tech job site said its latest survey of hiring managers and recruiters shows the growth in hiring "has reached a level where positions are staying open for months due to a shortage of qualified research professionals."

"All the top developers that are looking are getting multiple offers," said Greg Mikulin of Clarity Innovation Partners in Palo Alto. "Even candidates that aren't looking are getting offers every day, because they are listed on LinkedIn or other places."

The increased competition for a small pool of workers

Several trends are driving the increased competition for a small pool of workers: a rapid growth in mobile computing; open source software, which is free and makes it much easier to launch a startup; and the accumulation of mountains of data that companies are discovering can be turned into new products.

He figures a good job will be waiting for him when he graduates then year. "The pace at which innovation is changing the world is crazy. I'm very fortunate that this thing I'm interested in, computers, is as well a thing that's in demand right now."