You should absolutely only do a postdoc on the supposition that you will get a tenure track faculty position afterwards. It makes no sense financially or emotionally to do one if your goal is to go into industry.
But how can we know that we picked the right person for the job if we aren't at the very least absolutely sure the alternatives were worse?
The human mind resists accepting decisions made without a proportional amount of effort put into those decisions. If we only get one candidate for the job, we will either hire them and deal with constant nagging doubt, or we will lower our standards to get more options we can reject to feel good, but at which point we've now created false hope in the remaining candidates and an illusion of more opportunities existing than actually do.
Humans are messy, and so everything is always fucked. Even when it's not, we find a way to make it so.
This is not how industry works, at least not in the US. Hire a good person, they sink or swim, life goes on. It’s only the harsh narrow bubble of academia that pits smart people against each other this way.
Maybe you haven’t been privy to conversations about whether certain people are sinking or swimming.
I would rather keep a consistently mediocre individual than an inconsistent one because I know what I can and can’t trust the former with. I have to keep
checking in on the latter. But I’ve met more than a couple loudmouths who disagree. Who think they can raise their stock by pushing someone else’s down.
Whether you see actions or not, I assure you that time and energy are being wasted on regrets.
I absolutely am in those conversations and see the time and energy, and some of it is mine, across a sizable organization. I am absolutely not saying that industry is a friction-free meritocracy, and of course there are politics everywhere.
What is unique to academia is the static supply of jobs. When people don't leave, new people face a huge uphill battle to join, and that battle is largely against their competition, not the institution that they seek to join.
If you can afford it, and that's your passion, great. But (at least in the states) you are instead a student with a doctorate degree now in play and saddled with a lot of student debt (150k average), I'm not sure it makes sense. That unfortunately is roughly 77% of folks out there (at least as of 2020).
