Yes - at the time Matt graduated, this was still the norm in CS. Things are changing and it's becoming more common to do a post-doc, but it's still not unusual to go directly (in the US).
I was going to write that I disagree with you, but according to the Taulbee survey this is true:
The percentage of Ph.D. graduates who took North American
academic jobs rose in 2015-16 for the second straight year,
to 30.7 from 29.0 last year. However, the percentage of
graduates taking tenure-track positions in North American
doctoral-granting computing departments fell from to 10.0 in
2014-15 to 9.0 in 2015-16. The percentage taking positions in
North American non-Ph.D.-granting computing departments
fell from 2.3 percent to 1.6 percent, while the percentage
taking North American academic postdoctoral positions
jumped from 9.7 percent to 14.3 percent.[1]
In the US the important form of "promotion" is in the form of salary. Titles are nice and probably provide some motivation, but if you can become a chaired professor at a top university, you will bring in a salary several times that of a new hire.
To further clarify: The UK has the distinct titles "reader" and "lecturer" before "professor." In the US, if you have a PhD and you're teaching a college class, you're called a professor, even if you're an adjunct (not tenure track). The tenure track titles are "assistant professor", "associate professor" and then just "professor." Informally, we tend to use "professor" to refer to all of them, and it's common for people to say "Professor Doe" even if the person is an assistant professor.
I have never seen the title "lecturer" used in the US. Can you recall where you saw it? The title "instructor" is quite common when the person does not have a PhD.
Lecturer is used at the University of California for instructors with a PhD and no research responsibilities. Some of them even have a form of tenure, "security of employment."
Lecturers are part- or full-time teaching faculty (usually not tenure-track, but some schools like UC's have tenure-track Lecturer tracks) e.g., https://profiles.stanford.edu/48960
Interesting, it was not a title used in the schools I attended (Virginia Tech, William and Mary) or have I seen it used elsewhere. I just checked Harvard, and they use it, too, so it's not just a west coast thing.
Here professor is quite a distinguished title, and while it isn't legally protected, I've never seen it used for anyone except a very senior academic who has been formally appointed as a professor.
