I'd like to see those as absolute numbers, and preferably un-smoothed. The corresponding "dip" seems to be in post-docs.
I got my physics PhD in the late 90's. Anecdotally during that time period, morale about employment was pretty low. As I recall a handful of activist students got the American Physical Society to acknowledge the issue. Physics Today was starting to print articles about non-academic employment, though mostly speculative.
Possibly as a result, I saw what seemed like a real push among physics students to pursue industry options, including programming. Many of us were good programmers. My thesis project ran on thousands of lines of code that I wrote for hardware that I designed. And those years seemed pretty good for engineering employment.
My impression is that interest in joining the post doc cadre evaporated, and students with any sort of engineering ability grabbed whatever industry jobs they could get.
I got my physics PhD in the late 90's. Anecdotally during that time period, morale about employment was pretty low. As I recall a handful of activist students got the American Physical Society to acknowledge the issue. Physics Today was starting to print articles about non-academic employment, though mostly speculative.
Possibly as a result, I saw what seemed like a real push among physics students to pursue industry options, including programming. Many of us were good programmers. My thesis project ran on thousands of lines of code that I wrote for hardware that I designed. And those years seemed pretty good for engineering employment.
My impression is that interest in joining the post doc cadre evaporated, and students with any sort of engineering ability grabbed whatever industry jobs they could get.