Hewlett-Packard is shrinking again.

An estimated 150 to 300 HP Corvallis employees will leave the company by Thursday under the latest incentive package designed to reduce the global tech giant's payroll.

Following what has become its standard practice, the secretive Silicon Valley company isn't saying exactly how many local employees took the "enhanced early retirement" package. The estimate is based on a loose consensus among local financial planners, former Hewlett-Packard employees and others familiar with the company's Corvallis operations.

"Even for some people who work at HP it's difficult to get actual numbers, but that's the word I've heard from several different sources," said Matt Andresen, vice president of Turman Financial Group, who has met with a number of Hewlett-Packard workers coming out in the current wave of work-force reduction.

The buyouts don't seem to be targeting any particular department of the company.

"I'm seeing all slices, from technicians and operators all the way up to high-level management," said Megan Schneider, a former HP engineer who now works as an adviser for Hurley Financial Group, where her work has focused primarily on Hewlett-Packard workers.

In a conference call with investors last week, Chief Financial Officer Cathie Lesjak said about 3,000 workers had opted to take early retirement companywide. "These employees will leave HP by May 31," Lesjak said.

She said the buyouts would cost the company about $400 million, but the expense would be offset by a savings of $500 million from the company's decision to freeze its U.S. pension plan.

The offer was limited to U.S. employees of Hewlett-Packard, and eligibility was determined by a point system based on age and length of service - a 55-year-old worker who's been with HP for 20 years, for instance, would have a score of 75. Employees needed at least 65 points to qualify.

The terms of the package appear to be similar to previous early retirement offers. It includes a severance payment of a half-month's base salary for each year of service, up to a maximum of 14 months' pay. Another enticement: It comes with full retiree medical benefits, an increasingly rare perk for American workers.

"This is a pretty good package," Schneider said.

But the next one - if there is one - might not be so generous. After watching wave after wave of job cuts, some accompanied by financial incentives and some not, a growing number of HP veterans seem to be concluding the safest course is to get out while the getting is good.

For many of her clients, Schneider said, the thought process goes something like this: "Should I take this? Is this the best offer I'll get? Is there going to be another one? Or is my job just going to go away?"

The prospect of declining medical benefits is the deciding factor for some people, Andresen said.

"That's a big reason why people are looking to get out," he said.

Any estimate of local employee numbers has to be pieced together from a variety of outside sources because Hewlett-Packard has ceased providing hard data about how many workers it employs at individual plants or even throughout individual states.

In fact, company spokesman Ed Woodward said, the only headcount figure HP is willing to give out these days is a worldwide approximation: 156,000.

As recently as 1996, Hewlett-Packard employed about 6,000 people in Corvallis, where the company's hugely profitable inkjet printer technology was developed. That figure doesn't include the thousands of contract workers who staffed the cafeteria, manned the security booths, wrote technical manuals and performed a variety of other tasks on the sprawling Circle Boulevard campus.

But those numbers dwindled steadily over the last decade as HP moved inkjet production to low-wage foreign countries, retooled other parts of its operations and moved to cut payroll through buyouts, severance offers and early retirement.

After Thursday, when the current enhanced early retirement program is complete, Hewlett-Packard will probably have about 2,500 Corvallis employees.