SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Sheila Leary and Cheri Kalenian are veteran players in the high-stakes Silicon Valley options game.

The two women aren't top managers or even star programmers, the sort traditionally lavished with stock options. They are friends who met as co-workers in a corporate accounting department.

In this high-tech never-never land, however, ordinary rules don't apply. A hot start-up's stock price is propelled by the whiff of something new more than humdrum fundamentals. Experienced talent is in such demand that even peons drive hard signing bargains. And just like the Valley's top guns, they know full well how options can make them rich.

"If you do it right, you can easily double your salary," says Ms. Kalenian, 27, who got her start along with Ms. Leary in 1991 at software maker Adobe Systems Inc. Options, 31-year-old Ms. Leary adds, are "how you really make your money out here."

Option-driven tales of rags to riches are a staple of Silicon Valley lore. Realtors here still talk about February 1997, when Netscape Communications Corp. granted its first round of options and housing purchases soared.

"I had an assembly-line guy get options on 100 shares," at Northern Telecom Ltd., says Kelly La, general manager of Pro-Search Employment Services, a job-placement service in San Jose. "He was really good at quality assurance."

Yet as the stories of Sheila Leary and Cheri Kalenian show, options are a game of luck and timing, more like a lottery than a bonus.

After graduation from high school in Burlingame, Calif., Ms. Kalenian went to work for Adobe. Her pay and prospects were so good that she never bothered to go to college full-time, though she did take some evening courses.

"For what I do, managing accounts-payable departments, I don't need to go to school," she says. "I already have a lot of experience." She is married, and her husband is in the Navy in San Diego.

She spent four years at Adobe, a pioneer in the desktop-publishing boom. Though she missed out on its highest-growth years in the early and mid-1980s, she picked up options on 100 shares, earning $1,000 when she exercised them.

Then she heard from Remedy Corp., a maker of computer help-desk software. Remedy was getting ready to go public and needed someone to help set up an accounts-payable operation.

"Lots of start-ups were calling me -- they are always desperate for people with experience at big companies," she says. "Remedy looked like it was a good business. You talk to the engineers, you can figure out what's going on."

In 1995, less than a year after she came aboard, Remedy went public. The stock rocketed. Ms. Kalenian got options on "quite a few" shares below the IPO price, though she declines to give specifics. Then the stock split, and split again. With related stock purchases, she says, "I made 80 times my money." She declines to disclose the dollar value of her gains.

One aggressive policy that helped her: Remedy allowed its employees to exercise their options after just a few months, something Silicon Valley recruiters say is increasingly common. Many employees who once had to toil a full year for their options to vest now wait just six months.

"The bar has been raised about what it takes to keep people happy," says Lynn Taylor, research director for Robert Half International, a specialized staffing firm in Menlo Park, Calif. "The No. 1 issue companies have is keeping pace with growth opportunities, which comes down to holding top talent. It's very different from five years ago, when companies fired lots of staff and their stock prices went up."

Ms. Leary, a native of Fargo, N.D., moved to Los Angeles when she was 18 and got a job in the accounts-receivable department of a Marriott hotel. She later moved up to the Valley, and took a job at Adobe. There, like Ms. Kalenian, she watched ordinary people scoop up hundreds of thousands of dollars with the help of options.

She followed her friend to Remedy in 1995, where she picked up options on 1,500 shares. But after the hot IPO, the market had cooled on Remedy: It was old news, and speculators had moved on to the Next Big Thing.

Remedy still had a hard-working start-up culture, and Ms. Leary took to calling the office after dinner to see if she needed to return to work. "The options gave me a greater sense of wanting the company to do well," she says. "But in the end the stock wasn't doing anything."

Ms. Kalenian left Remedy in 1998. She had scoured the financial press for news of other start-ups, networking in typical freewheeling Valley fashion. "I read magazines, contacted chief executives, talked to lots of my friends," she says. Some of her best ideas, she says, come from Ms. Leary's boyfriend, an engineer at Apple Computer Inc.

Her next target: OnSale Inc., an Internet auction house that had already gone public but had a depressed stock price. She says she got options on "a fair amount of shares" when she signed in July 1997.

"Investors had doubts about them," Ms. Kalenian says. But her analysis showed they were an up-and-coming Internet-commerce company that went public at a bad time. "I knew they'd catch on," she says. Did they ever: OnSale's stock rose 250% in the eight months she owned it.

Ms. Kalenian's instincts aren't infallible. Both she and Ms. Leary scoffed when one of their friends took the options package offered by an out-of-town Internet company early last year. "He said he was going to Seattle to sell books on-line," Ms. Kalenian says. "We laughed." The bookseller was Amazon.com, which went public in May 1997. Its stock has risen 1,300% since. Their friend, Ms. Kalenian says, "is wiping his nose with $100 bills."

Ms. Leary followed her friend to OnSale in February 1997 and got options of her own. But by then, the big run-up in its stock was over. The stock value was below her options price when her first 775 shares vested early this month. She has given notice at OnSale and plans to leave August 20, 1998 giving up options on an additional 5,225 shares.

Ms. Kalenian left OnSale in May for Vivra Specialty Partners, a privately held medical-supply company in San Mateo, a few miles from her other bonanzas. She suspects the option gravy-train is about over, and is eager to get work experience in a field beyond high-tech. "There are so many startups now, and they all seem to be doing the same thing," she says. "It's getting harder to judge."

At Viavra she has equity -- a surer bet than options. "They're giving me some of the private shares," she says. If the company goes public or is purchased, she could make yet another windfall.

All told Ms. Kalenia figures she has made "several hundred thousand dollars" from options and related stock deals. "It's put me in a nice house, given me two new cars," she says. "I did it intentionally, but I was lucky, too."

As for Ms. Leary, most of the options she's earned since coming to Silicon Valley in 1991 have proven worthless, or earned just enough to keep her hanging on for another roll of the dice. For all her 70-hour work weeks at three successive companies, she has only $4,000 to show -- and that came from Adobe. But her salary -- $57,000 at OnSale -- is lush by Fargo standards. "I earn more than both my parents," she marvels, "and they've got master's degrees."

Ms. Leary sees her next step as "a temp job, while I look for a start-up that's way pre-public." Of options, she says: "I'll do it again, but it's not worth ruining your life just to gamble."