I got a PhD in 2004 and could not find any non-academic research positions in the US. (I was pretty fed up with academia at the time, so I didn't look at those.

I got a PhD in 2004 and could not find any non-academic research positions in the US. (I was pretty fed up with academia at the time, so I didn't look at those.) The closest I got was a job offer from a group at Telcordia Research, but when I went up for an in-person interview, I found the building mostly empty, most of the people there very bitter, and the only group that was hiring doing product development, not research. (And it was in New Jersey.) I declined the offer and went back to contracting. At IBM. That wasn't a smart move either.