I finished my physics PhD at 28, in 1982. My research group let me stay on for a year while I looked for a job. I decided to pursue teaching-oriented positions at small colleges similar to the one where I had done my undergraduate.
My first position at 29 was for two years, as a double sabbatical-replacement.
My second and final position at 31 was a tenure-track position at a small college in the southeast US, where I did get tenure eventually. I met my wife there, another faculty member in a different department. We got married and bought a house, even though she had tenure and I didn't (yet), because at that time, this was the kind of place where one had to really screw up in order to be denied tenure.
I had to teach a lot of different courses (both physics and computer science because it was a "mixed" department) and therefore had to "really learn" a lot of different material, but it was fun.
Towards the end of my 30s, the college instituted a policy in which department chairs had to rotate every two years. At that time, I was the only person who was eligible to be chair besides the current chair. He had hired me, had been chair for over ten years and had been "the" physics faculty (in a combined physics/math department) for several years before that. I was not prepared for dealing with this. It was not fun.
But I survived, passed on the chair to someone else, even ended up serving another term as chair later, and ended up retiring there.
