 So my guest today on the remote version of Coffee Time, James Gioshon, I saw you had on the website a little pronunciation. Gioshon. Widget, I guess. Who spoke that? Where does that audio clip come from? That comes from like, you can like type in your name phonetically. Okay. I forget exactly what I did so long ago. I just had so many issues when I gave talks back in academia where people just absolutely butchered my name and I was trying to make it a little bit less butchery. Frat's I record my big camera. How long have you been out of academia? So I got my job in October of 2018. So it's almost two years now. A year and a half, almost two years, yeah. Yeah, I did the Insight program. I had mentioned this when I went to double ES. The Insight program was kind of like hit and miss for me. That's my last question. What's your hot take on it? What's your review? Yeah, I think it wasn't bad. There's lots of common sense stuff you learn. I think the main advantage you have is connections to the people in your cohort and in principle, they might help you further down the line, get the next job or just someone you can talk to if you wanted some advice about some situation that you're in. Many of the things that you learn about resume building and how to do interviews and stuff is it's something that can be done on your own. If you're self-guided, you may not do it perfectly, but it's something you can do on your own. So it's not like some unique thing that they're doing. And the other thing is that they're not really teaching you how to be a data scientist. They're really just teaching you how to present yourself. They're really trying to untrain a lot of the bad science habits, scientist habits is kind of there. It's like a boot untraining camp in a way. Yeah, I don't know. There's a lot of clones out there that are not all exactly the same as insight in terms of like what they do. I think if someone is in a position like me, like a postdoc looking to make the jump, it probably makes sense to shop around, like look at those other ones that are out there and think about whether those might be better for you. I see your resume and the things that I knew about your astral career. So I heard your name first with Voxcharta is how I knew about you. So but I always sort of perceived you as being very like algorithm, very data science-y already in the astral world. Do you think, looking back hindsight 2020, do you think like this kind of jump was always kind of in the cards for you? Do you think you had set yourself up long before or was this a big shift for you to decide, I'm gonna leave the academic path and I'm gonna go into this technical side? So in grand school, like most of what I did was a hundred dynamical simulations like 3D simulations of supernovae and tidal disruption events using a fluid dynamics code called flash written in Fortran. I knew like when I was working on that that, hey, this is a skill that is not transferable to most anywhere. And when I started my postdoc, I made it a conscious effort to shift myself more into the data analysis, data science, model building kind of space. Both because I thought it would help my academic prospects and because I thought it would be better for the industry job to have just like more exposure. It is kind of conscious effort to shift like what I was working on to be a little bit more I thought transferable to the real world. Now in the end, I do use physics occasionally from time to time in my job, just as like a sanity check, I'd say. Like I know like how to do unit analysis and order of magnitude calculations in my head, which I think is pretty useful sometimes when you're just trying to solve something quickly. I think that's my only actual skill. Like when I boil it down, like I know some facts about things, but I think the only actual skill that I have is like, I can quickly come up with not a great answer to that question. This is like kind of Fermi problem solving. A lot of people, they, it feels like BS to them because you know, you're just kind of like, you like sit there and you think for a second and you just spit out a number of things in your head and they're like, well, how did you come up with that? And you know, it's, then you're like, well, it's probably only accurate to an order of magnitude. And then they're not impressed. They're like, oh, that doesn't sound very accurate to me. So, so I think, you know, it's like one of those things though, like when you're not talking to someone, it's just useful like when you're coding up a solution to something, just like, have like an idea of like, this is, you know, on this time scale versus that time scale. And it's just gonna help you think, I think about that kind of thing. Can I ask you like one more question but you don't have to answer. You can answer any way you like. Why did you leave, leave academia? Did you run out of options? Or were you, or before that point where you were like, I'm not happy. What, you know, did you leave it or did it leave you? I think it was a mixture of the two. Like, I applied fairly broadly my first like faculty job cycle, many places where I was just like, I probably won't be happy at this place but let's just apply, see like what happens. And I got pickier as time went on. I was just like, no, I'm not gonna waste my time applying to this place that I absolutely know will not work for me. But roughly how many cycles did you apply? How many years? Four cycles. Four. So yeah, so it was like, I was, yeah, I mean, in total I submitted probably 50 or 60 applications. I know people who submitted close to a hundred and you know, ended up not getting anything that they wanted. And you know, at some point I was just like, okay, this is really banging my head against the wall. And particularly like some years, even like the, my top choice of all the choices, I was like, this is actually kind of a trade-off. Like I'm not really sure I'd be totally happy at this place either. And you know, I think I was always kind of doubtful like in the process. And at least for me, I knew that if I did that, like if I became faculty, I would to be satisfied with like the level of work I was doing, I would have to work at least 60 hours a week, if not more. And at some point I just like, nah, I don't really want to kill myself to be happy. Sure. So yeah, I mean, like my work, I work like 40 to 45 hours a week. The only exceptions are when I was traveling out to the customer site, there's nothing really else to do. We could be working like 10 or 12 hour days, but it was just like, you know, a couple of weeks out of the year that you'd have to do that. I see you still on astronomy Twitter too. I feel like you're still pretty active there. Yeah, you know, I think like it really brings me like a lot of happiness to help people out who are thinking about the transition. I think there's, there are a few of us who have made the, you know, conscientious effort to continue to remain in contact with the astronomy community. Many people fall off a base on the earth. You know, they just say like, screw this and they just go away, which is fine. It's totally their right to do that. But it does give me enjoyment to, you know, talk to people and help them out if they're thinking about making a change of careers because I've gone through that process. People were still emailing me like, you know, six months, maybe up to a year after I left the field, but really just like completely died once people understood that, you know, there's no longer like active in the field. Right. And that's fine. Cause I don't want to like answer random emails anymore. Yeah. But, you know, it's just like really the kind of the memory is extremely short of like people who were once in the field. And I remember like reading many great papers in my subfield where it's like, well, what happened to that guy, you know, who wrote this paper on, you know, this like really great paper that I really like and I just can't find any trace of them, right? They're probably not on social media is like older generations. But I just find it really fascinating that, you know, there's just kind of these dead end threads of thought because these people just take all of their knowledge capital with them when they go, you know, leave the field. So anyway, yeah, it just like, it brings me like a lot of pleasure to maintain that connection, at least for now. I have noticed like my interest is like declining a little bit like year after year. I don't know if it'll ever go straight to zero. You're somebody who's created web services and like websites that have lasted years. But like when I click on your website, astrocrash.net, it too is like effectively a relic of your academic time and you haven't updated it since you've come into the industry side, to the real world. And I've noticed that's also something that, you know, people's githubs will sometimes still be active depending on what they're doing. Like not only do the papers go away but like the last website, the last version of the website is like, I'm a postdoc or whatever and like, and that's also people don't seem to maintain that like that sense of advertisement, I guess. Can I maintain like a coherent like story about yourself? Yeah. It's kind of easier in academia. It's like, oh, you know, I did this project and this project and they all relate to the universe in this like grand, you know, way. And it's harder to build like kind of a coherent story of oneself, which is why it's kind of hard to write a resume when you go from academia to industries that, you know, here's everything that I was and now I'm doing something completely different and I'll like make that coherent. Yeah, I don't know. It's a lot of work to like, like there's so much image building in astronomy, like in terms of like manicuring yourself to be presentable in various ways. And, you know, website is part of that, but yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I think part of like the nice thing about not being in the field anymore is that I don't have to give a damn about that anymore. I can just be myself, which is really kind of refreshing. So I mean, so like I said, I knew your work from Vox-Carta, Vox-Carta? It's Carta. It was actually an Italian grad student at Santa Cruz who came up with the name because they asked him for like, can you give me like a Latin name that means like paper talk? And that's the name he came up with. That's Michele Fumagali. He's, I think, a professor in Italy now at the University of New York. Anyway, that's where the name comes from. I mean, we used it in grad school for our, I mean, like every else for their coffee discussions. I think it's one of the, it's like, it is the only, I think, I will go on record of saying I think it's the only successful AstroPH wrapper. There's been many things, you know, blogs and hosts and you know, whatever, people who have reconstituted the AstroPH content for various reasons. And I think Vox-Carta is the only one that like has widespread pickup and I think it's still beloved. So I think it's a great service. And you know, if you're trickling your interest still just at the 0.1% of like effort, it, I feel like it's still being used. Maybe the numbers don't support it. I feel like it's still a killer service. There are some people who use it. I kind of feel like it's pretty flat. It probably has some decline. I haven't really paid too much attention to it. The hilarious thing is that like 2009 is when I made it and I worked on it like pretty hard, like to get it functional for like, I want to say like a year. And then at some point I was like, look, I got to be doing science. Like this is not helping my case or like getting postdocs and stuff. So I made it another effort to like just like, hey, I'm just going to kind of maintain it but not do anything new. And I literally did nothing to it. Like the only thing I did was just like, make sure it was up. And if there was like some error, I would fix it. But I like feature froze it essentially, you know, my third or fourth year at grad school. And I think astronomers really love using tools that never change. So it's like the fact that it never actually evolved beyond what it was, I think was comforting to people. Yeah. And like now it has like slightly old web 2.0 kind of, you know, like it looks just a little out of date which is very comforting to us. Right, right. Yeah, like the uproar of like ADS, which- Yeah, right, exactly. You know, format and it's just like, it's hilarious to me. Do you look back fondly as, do you consider yourself a lifetime astronomer? Do you think that was a good path for James long-term? I think like, the PhD in zero regrets. Like I think that was, I would do that again in a heartbeat. Like that was a great experience. I, you know, had a lot of freedom. I had an advisor I really liked. And postdoc was fine the first couple of years, but I did think that, you know, particularly in a reevaluate around year four or five, I was like, eh, I probably should have tried to exit a little bit earlier. There was just a slight regret in like kind of like, not using that, you know, maybe two years that I was really not being very happy to do something else. Sure. And so that, you know, that's kind of how I feel about it. I feel like the experience is great for the PhD. And in the postdoc, I did have some time to try like new stuff and broaden my skill set. But I stopped really growing as like a, both as a person and technically, like kind of after the first couple of years of switching over to a different thing. James, I really appreciate your candor and your willingness to share your journey. I'm sure you've given this spiel to people a lot. And so I appreciate you giving it to me and hopefully to my YouTube audience. That worked out at least. Yeah, see, the whole grand plan is working. That's right. All right, I'll talk to you later, man. All right, man, see you later.