It certainly was easier to get an academic job circa 1960. Things have gotten more difficult in physics because the experimental frontier has moved further away, I mean, you can make whatever theory you want and it is meaningless because we don’t have a machine that can measure the neutrino mass, observe neutrino decay, confirm physics at the GUT or string scale, detect the darkon, etc.

Even something like Mandelbrot’s work was disappointing if you were in grad school in the 1990s because it was not like enough progress was made in fractals post-Mandelbrot that you could get a job working on fractals or chaos.