[the_watcher]

It seemed like this was about someone transitioning to industry data science, not CS. From the people I have worked with that came to DS by way of academia, the post sounds extremely accurate. It may be that you can get a faculty job in CS without much postdoc experience, but it’s not true for psychology, political science, cognitive science, urban planning, economics, etc (all backgrounds of PhDs I have worked with in big tech data science).

[barry-cotter]

Post docs are not normative in economics academia and I don’t think they are in political science either. Psychology and Cognitive Science I’m sure do have post docs as the academic job market has fierce competition and I don’t think there’s much private sector demand for their skills.

[the_watcher]

At my FAANG job, we happily hired CogSci PhD’s, and I also worked with multiple political science PhDs who’d left or turned down postdocs. I’m unsure about any of the Econ PhDs that I worked with, but I strongly suspect you’re right as it did seem like they were drowning in job options relative to others (conditional on getting a FAANG job in the first place, I suppose).