His timeline doesn't apply to Computer Science - and possibly other fields like engineering, but I have much less experience with them. Because CS Ph.D.s can get industry jobs, there's less need for them to do postdocs. Some do, but it's still common for freshly minted Ph.D.s to get academic jobs. Of course, getting those positions is still just as difficult as it is for the real sciences, but there's not necessarily the 2-6 year delay.<p>I've given this topic some thought recently. Academia has it's problems, but what I do like is that I can work on things that are interesting and useful, but not necessarily profitable.<p>How can something be useful without being profitable? I do research in systems and high performance. In theory, the software we create could be sold. Some startups exist that do just that - Cilk Arts and RapidMind are two examples. But I'm skeptical of their viability; companies that exists solely to sell compilers rarely do well.<p>The kind of research I do is valuable to companies, but rarely as something to sell on its own. Intel, for example, does research in programming models for emerging architectures not because they want to sell that software, but because they need it so programmers can use the processors they do sell.