It's been more than 20 years since college student Michael Dell started selling PC clones from his dorm room at the University of Texas. Ever since, Austin has been a beacon on the high-tech landscape.

Aside from Dell, many other technology companies - most notably IBM (6,300 employees) and AMD (2,000 employees) - have large presences in the city. With a growing metro area of 1.4 million people, this state capital and university town has business, government and academia all working together toward a healthy business climate that encourages innovation. Hardware, software and other technology developers like to locate their R&D operations in Austin; processors are a specialty. In fact, Freescale Semiconductor, the largest chip maker in the U.S., employs 5,400 in the city. Motorola, Qualcomm, Nokia, Silicon Laboratories and AT&T are also in town. Total tech employment is upwards of 80,000.

"Austin has a strong history of innovation and is host to a wide range of fast-growing small to mid-market companies, particularly in the software and semiconductor space, so roots in the VC community are deep," says Kara Miller, branch manager for IT recruiter Sapphire Technologies in Austin. "As the unemployment rate continues to hover around 4 percent and there continues to be a need for IT talent here, the employment climate remains strong."

What's most in demand? Miller says software developers (especially Java/J2EE and .NET) have always been, and will continue to be, a staple in the Austin market. "We have also seen a stronger need for talented individuals with open-source platform experience in Linux/Unix, Apache, MySQL, and PHP/Perl/ Python."

Austin job hunters will be glad to hear that IT job listings at Dice are up 12 percent this quarter after a dip in the second quarter. Currently more than 1,200 jobs are available in a wide range of professions. And the annual Milken Institute Best Performing Cities Index, which measures a city's ability to create and maintain jobs, ranks Austin at number 20 of 200 major metro areas, up from 58 last year.

According to the 2007 State of Technology Innovation in Austin report, engineering positions at semiconductor firms are expected to increase by 13 percent this year, while programming positions are seen growing by 23 percent.

Motivated job hunters may want to investigate Perficient, a large IT consulting firm headquartered in Austin that's so successful Fortune magazine rates it the sixth fastest-growing tech company in the country. It's on the hunt for consultants in technology, business, usability and project management.

At Molecular Imprints, another of Austin's fastest-growing firms, mechanical engineers, software engineers and application engineers all have a shot at joining a team working on lithographic imprints for semiconductors. At ZixCorp, a fast-growing e-mail security firm, the need is for support technicians and systems integrators. Another tech company worth exploring: NetQoS, which has twice been selected as one of Austin's best places to work by the Austin Business Journal.

These companies represent just a few examples of Austin's energy. This year, the city was ranked the best place for business in the U.S., according to Moody's Economy.com. Samsung Electronics certainly got the message, opening up a $3.5 billion processor plant last year that created 1,000 new jobs. The Samsung plant was a boon for Opportunity Austin, a local five-year plan aimed at creating 72,000 jobs by the end of 2008.

Austin is also trying to nurture new green energy and biotech ventures, with $400 million in venture capital coming to town in 2006, most of it heading into software development.

One cautionary note is sounded by a 20-year software development veteran who comments in Dice's discussion forums that there are "lots of qualified people applying for each job. Employers can afford to be and so are very, very picky. You have to be a 110 percent match to their requirements. Salaries are still well below what they were in the 90s." Nevertheless, Sapphire's Miller sees "vast potential for success in the Austin area." There's certainly a lot going on.