[analog31]

When I was a physics grad student ~35 years go, this was called "the birth control problem. I had every intention of going into industry. I described it to my dad who got his PhD in the 1950s and he said it was the same back then. But there's a perennial "this time it will be different."

[PaulHoule]

It wasn't the same in the 1950s. When it became really clear to me how dire the long term job situation was when I getting my PhD in the 1990s I started combing through issues of Physics Today and noticed that the field and academia as a whole was explosively expanding from 1920-1968 or so and there was a sudden crisis in the late 1960s, with an echo in the late 1970s and also when I was in in the late 1990s. (Physics Today said I had 2% odds of getting a permanent job even coming from a top school)

I had one day when I'd posted a Java applet to the web that got 100,000 impressions and getting so much attention for that and so little attention for papers that took me a year to write made me resolve to tell my thesis advisor that I was going to quit. Before I could tell him, he told me he had just a year of funding for me and I thought.. I could tough it out for a year. People were shocked when I did a postdoc when most of my cohort were going straight to finance.

My mental health went downhill in Germany and I stomped away, in retrospect I was the only native English speaker at the institute and I could have found a place for myself for some time had I taken on the task of proofreading papers and I can easily imagine I could have made it in academia but heck, life on a horse farm doing many sorts of software development has been a blast.

[analog31]

One big disruption in the job market was that mandatory age-based retirement was outlawed. This created a span of several years when there were virtually no retirements.

I should have mentioned that my dad's degree was in chemistry, and it might have been a different vibe. But the production of PhDs at a rate faster than they could be absorbed by academic hiring was a thing. My dad (and mom, she got her master's in chemistry) went into industry too, so maybe I was lucky to have good role models.