Kim Booth was happy to have her job as a spokeswoman for Laurel Networks, a telecommunications equipment maker in Robinson. Then she landed another one, as marketing director for TimeSys Inc., a Downtown-based software engineering firm.

"It happened fairly quickly," Booth said of the two-week span between TimeSys' call and the moment she was hired. "I had seen the job listed and thought about it but wasn't actively looking to move. It was a gut call."

Booth isn't alone. Several local tech acolytes report signs of life on the job front after a long, quiet period of licking wounds left from the dot-com bust, allowing many to consider new opportunities at other firms.

It may never again be like the go-go late '90s, but after years of just hanging on, the freedom to even dream about change is welcome, job seekers say.

Data storage company Network Appliance recently said it planned to double its O'Hara staff to 160 over the next two years and move to larger quarters in Cranberry. Monroeville-based nuclear energy concern Westinghouse Electric Co. said it was on the prowl for more engineers. Indianola-based medical device maker Medrad is adding 100 jobs this year, 60 of them locally. And Wexford-based software and services firm True Commerce Inc. has hired 20 people since the beginning of the year and expects to hire 30 by the end of this year.

"We're absolutely seeing an increase in the number of jobs" listed on Pittsburgh Technology Council's online job bank, said Cyndy Tabor, the tech group's Web site manager. It's nothing like the rash of companies that were posting 50, 100 or even 200 openings during the dot-com heyday, she said, but "I'm starting to hear that kind of talk again, but the numbers aren't as big."

To be sure, the evidence of a tech job rebound is more anecdotal than it is measurable. Although they tend to miss shifts in employment until well after they happen, recent Pittsburgh-area statistics from the state Department of Labor and Industry still show stagnant employment in the many categories that include tech work, such as telecommunications and technical services.

Chris Briem, a regional economist at the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Social and Urban Research, said tech industries in general are noted for a lot of turnover, with workers shifting from one company to another. So while some companies may be hiring, others may be laying off, creating little job growth overall, particularly in a region such as Pittsburgh, which is still a relatively minor tech player compared with giants such as Silicon Valley, Boston and Seattle.

This shifting could explain why the local numbers have yet to show much of a bump up, despite recent announcements of more hiring. Indeed, George McKee, president and chief executive officer of True Commerce, noted that at least nine of his firm's new hires came from the local office of Ariba Inc., the former FreeMarkets online auction house that merged with the Sunnyvale, Calif., competitor and took a paring knife to 125 local jobs.

While the loss of the FreeMarkets jobs was painful, the firm still employs about 500 Downtown. And many of the former FreeMarkets workers are finding jobs elsewhere, headhunters say. Some, such as former marketing executive Chris Gormley, struck out for new environs even before the Ariba deal was completed last summer.

"I thrive on the new, the building, the sort of creating something out nothing," said Gormley, vice president of strategy and business development at The Haley Enterprise, a Sewickley-based business software developer.

Gormley likened the exodus from FreeMarkets-Ariba to the hordes of former Fore Systems employees who littered the community with start-ups before and even after the Marshall-based computer networking concern merged into the British conglomerate Marconi in 1999.

The $4.5 billion deal occurred near the pinnacle of a period that saw the region legitimately lay claim to becoming a high-tech hotbed, fueled in part by Fore multimillionaires who went on to form new companies and finance other ventures.

Morgan Lewis attorney Eric Kline, whose client list includes several local technology firms, views the recent shift among local tech workers moving from one firm to another to be a similarly healthy sign. New jobs coincide with start-ups getting venture funding that allows them to grow and add workers. "It's the way the world works," he said.