By Claire Cain Miller and Jenna Wortham, New York Times, March 25/26, 2011

SAN FRANCISCO —.... Computer whiz kids have long been prize hires in Silicon Valley. But these days tech companies are dreaming up new perks and incentives as the industry wages its fiercest war for talent in more than a decade.

Free meals, shuttle buses and stock options are de rigueur. So the game maker Zynga dangles free haircuts and iPads to recruits, who are also told that they can bring their dogs to work....

Then there are salaries. Google is paying computer science majors just out of college $90,000 to $105,000, as much as $20,000 more than it was paying a few months ago. That is so far above the industry average of $80,000 that start-ups cannot match Google salaries. Google declined to comment.

Two executives at a small start-up who spoke on the condition of anonymity said it recently lost an intern when one of the biggest start-ups offered the candidate a 40 percent bump in stock options, potentially worth hundreds of thousands of dollars — but only if the candidate accepted the job before hanging up the phone...