Tag: angela wesselman pierce catfish

Facebook, Relationships And “Catfish”: It’s Complicated

If ever a trailer did not depict what a movie is actually about it’s this trailer for Universal Pictures’ “Catfish”, a movie about Facebook the subject matter of which could not be further from that other movie about Facebook. I’d like to use this sentence to say “Spoiler Alert” about fifteen times because the next couple paragraphs are going to be full of them.

If you hate spoilers do yourself a favor and stop reading now. That said, the following exposition shouldn’t prevent you from seeing the movie, I’ve seen it twice and enjoyed both times.

“Catfish” is a movie about Nev Schulman, a 24-year-old New York photographer and his relationship with eight year old Abby Pierce and her 19-year-old sister Megan Faccio whom he meets on Facebook in 2007. I’m sure all of you can see this coming, but Megan isn’t who she claims to be and neither is Abby. Nev and Ariel Schulman, Henry Joost and the viewer get taken for a wild and well-documented ride, especially for the last 40 minutes of the movie.

In summary Megan and a bunch of other Facebook identities are characters invented by artist Angela Wesselman’s imagination, as Wesselman is trapped in Michigan taking care of two disabled children and has no outlets for creative expression other than her paintings — which she ships to Nev Schulman under the guise of them being her (real) daughter Abby’s — and her elaborate storytelling on Facebook. “Scam is not the word,” say the filmmakers regarding Wesselman’s bait and switch.

Plot twists aside, the film uses social networking and other tropes unique to the Internet age such as Google Maps, “sexting” and Photoshop in order to give a richer view of the emotional narrative, as Nev Schulman and Angela/Megan’s digital courtship drags on for eight months of phone calls, MP3 exchanges and even Facebook wall “infighting” among the various imaginary members of the Pierce family. At some point Schulman sends Megan an IRL post card, and remarks how odd the act of sending snail mail is.

What’s the most interesting about the film is that Wesselman is a totally new kind of artist, creating a entire world for Nev through multiple fabricated online identities. When asked during a screening last week why he, as a self-proclaimed part of the “Google Generation” never bothered to Google search Abby Pierce or Angela Wesselman or Megan Faccio, Nev Schulman said he did and came up with nothing, not pushing it any further because wanted to believe. “There are plenty of people with no Google presence,” says Schulman. Heh

This ambiguity surrounding “Catfish” (including its bloody Catfish logo) has lead it to be the subject of many attacks most notably from Movieline in their post “Does Sundance Sensation Catfish Have A Truth Problem?” which asserts that both the Schulmans and Joost knew that Megan wasn’t who she said she was right from the beginning. As counter to this, filmaker Ariel Schulman revealed that the movie is not being marketed as a documentary because the “D-word” turns off younger viewers to whom he thinks the film would be most beneficial as a cautionary tale.

While some scenes from the movie tend to reinforce the “they knew the entire time” hypothesis (as does Schulman’s shit-eating grin throughout) the “whether or not any of the boys suspected it” issue is complicated and best left to individual viewer discretion.

What should remain with you after seeing “Catfish” is how convincing the Facebook soap opera Wesselman pulled off could be to someone yearning for a human connection, and also as a side note, that model Aimee Gonzales’ boyfriend, whose images Wesselman used to pull off the ruse, chided her shortly after hearing about her inadvertent role in the film, “See I told you you shouldn’t have put all those pictures online.”

Catfish hits theatres September 17th, one month before the more glamorous “The Social Network.” Both Wesselman and Nev Schulman are still friends on Facebook.

Information provided by CrunchBase


Silicon Valley’s Dark Secret: It’s All About Age

An interesting paradox in the technology world is that there is both a shortage and a surplus of engineers in the United States. Talk to those working at any Silicon Valley company, and they will tell you how hard it is to find qualified talent. But listen to the heart-wrenching stories of unemployed engineers, and you will realize that there are tens of thousands who can’t get jobs. What gives?

The harsh reality is that in the tech world, companies prefer to hire young, inexperienced, engineers.

And engineering is an “up or out” profession: you either move up the ladder or face unemployment. This is not something that tech executives publicly admit, because they fear being sued for age discrimination, but everyone knows that this is the way things are. Why would any company hire a computer programmer with the wrong skills for a salary of $150,000, when it can hire a fresh graduate—with no skills—for around $60,000?  Even if it spends a month training the younger worker, the company is still far ahead. The young understand new technologies better than the old do, and are like a clean slate: they will rapidly learn the latest coding methods and techniques, and they don’t carry any “technology baggage”.  As well, the older worker likely has a family and needs to leave by 6 pm, whereas the young can pull all-nighters.

At least, that’s how the thinking goes in the tech industry.

In their book Chips and Change, Professors Clair Brown and Greg Linden, of the University of California, Berkeley, analyzed Bureau of Labor Statistics and census data for the semiconductor industry and found that salaries increased dramatically for engineers during their 30s but that these increases slowed after the age of 40. At greater ages still, salaries started dropping, dependent on the level of education. After 50, the mean salary of engineers was lower—by 17% for those with bachelors degrees, and by 14% for those with masters degrees and PhDs—than the salary of those younger than 50. Curiously, Brown and Linden also found that salary increases for holders of postgraduate degrees were always lower than increases for those with bachelor’s degrees (in other words, even PhD degrees didn’t provide long-term job protection). It’s not much different in the software/internet industry. If anything, things in these fast-moving industries are much worse for older workers.

For tech startups, it usually boils down to cost: most can’t even afford to pay $60K salaries, so they look for motivated, young software developers who will accept minimum wage in return for equity ownership and the opportunity to build their careers. Companies like Zoho can afford to pay market salaries, but find huge advantage in hiring young workers. In 2006, Zoho’s CEO, Sridhar Vembu, initiated an experiment to hire 17-year-olds directly out of high school. He found that within two years, the work performance of these recruits was indistinguishable from that of their college-educated peers. Some ended up becoming superstar software developers.

Companies such as Microsoft say that they try to maintain a balance but that it isn’t easy. An old friend, David Vaskevitch, who was Senior Vice-President and Chief Technical Officer at Microsoft, told me in 2008 that he believes that younger workers have more energy and are sometimes more creative. But there is a lot they don’t know and can’t know until they gain experience. So Microsoft aggressively recruits for fresh talent on university campuses and for highly experienced engineers from within the industry, one not at the expense of the other. David acknowledged that the vast majority of new Microsoft employees are young, but said that this is so because older workers tend to go into more senior jobs and there are fewer of those positions to begin with. It was all about hiring the best and brightest, he said; age and nationality are not important.

So whether we like it or not, it’s a tough industry. I know that some techies will take offense at what I have to say, but here is my advice to those whose hair is beginning to grey:

  1. Move up the ladder into management, architecture, or design; switch to sales or product management; or jump ship and become an entrepreneur (old guys have a huge advantage in the startup world). Build skills that are more valuable to your company, and take positions that can’t be filled by entry-level workers.
  2. If you’re going to stay in programming, realize that the deck is stacked against you. Even though you may be highly experienced and wise, employers aren’t willing or able to pay an experienced worker twice or thrice what an entry-level worker earns. Save as much as you can when you’re in your 30s and 40s and be prepared to earn less as you gain experience.
  3. Keep your skills current. This means keeping up-to-date with the latest trends in computing, programming techniques, and languages, and adapting to change. To be writing code for a living when you’re 50, you will need to be a rock-star developer and be able to out-code the new kids on the block.

My advice to managers is to consider the value of the experience that the techies bring. With age frequently come wisdom and abilities to follow direction, mentor, and lead. Older workers also tend to be more pragmatic and loyal, and to know the importance of being team players. And ego and arrogance usually fade with age. During my tech days, I hired several programmers who were over 50. They were the steadiest performers and stayed with me through the most difficult times.

Finally, I don’t know of any university, including the ones I teach at, that tells its engineering students what to expect in the long term or how to manage their technical careers. Perhaps it is time to let students know what lies ahead.

Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa  is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at the School of Information at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. You can follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwaand find his research at www.wadhwa.com.