While I hardly think I should be doling out advice …
In algorithms, there have been a lot of postdoc positions advertising on the two main email lists, TheoryNT and dmanet. In my experience, many of the positions are in Europe. I’ve found that a lot of postdoc’s get their position by word of mouth.
I think, by far, the best thing is to get a postdoctoral fellowship. Freedom! It seems NSF doesn’t have a fellowship program for people in computer science. (Is that actually true?) But I have seen (and ignored, as I am not an American citizen) plenty of postdoc fellowship programs for Americans. If you aren’t American, try your home country. NSERC has great fellowships for Canadians that you can take out of the country if you got your Ph.D. in Canada and is tax-free if you take it to McGill. The short of it is, if you have a fellowship you have the academic freedom to study what you want to study. You can work with whoever you want, whether or not they have a research grant to pay a postdoc.
I’ve also thought that if you plan far enough in advance you could contact someone you really want to work with and convince them to write a grant with your help that includes funding for a postdoc. Any thoughts of whether that would work? I know NSF now asks for an “advising plan” when requesting funds for a postdoc salary. Would having the potential postdoc involved in the writing process help?
And there are schools and departments that have their own postdoc program – I think U. Penn and U. Toronto do.
Any other suggestions?
Thanks – all advice is welcome! (So are all postdocs…)
I don’t know if many people know about this, but in UC San Diego, we have the Information Theory and Applications Center (http://ita.ucsd.edu/) which gives fellowships to postdocs in CS theory, information theory and machine learning. As a postdoc at ITA, you are free to work on anything you want, and collaborate with anybody you want. I found it to be a great opportunity!
While the NSF does not have CS postdocs per se, there are the NSF Math Sciences Postdocs that many CS theory people have taken advantage of. There is also the new CIE Fellows program administered by the Computing Community Consortium that provides postdocs across CS.
Does anyone know if the Computing Innovation Fellowship program (http://cifellows.org/) will be offered again next year?
At TTI-C we have a number of 3-year research faculty positions, that are similar to postdocs, in the sense that they are not tenure-track. Theory and algorithms are among the areas we are usually hiring in.