We guarantee three times as much candy was eaten as made it onto the house. (Photo: flickr.com/carriestephens)

Have you ever engaged in a holiday activity with someone who just... didn't get it? You know, like someone who thinks you can't eat cookie dough or that Christmas trees need to be decorated in one single color so they look "nice"? Wired sure found someone:

An engineer has used his expertise to create an accurate and festive 3-D gingerbread model of his summer house using a laser cutter.

Working on the project with his wife, Johan von Konow generated the necessary shapes for the construction in CAD before using a 50-watt laser engraver to cut them out of a flat sheet of gingerbread.

Your argument is invalid, sir: The point of building a gingerbread house is sneaking M&Ms and gum drops and Red Vines and mini Mr. Goodbars until you puke. Save the high-tech laser-cutting for creating a truly awe-inspiring Christmas village, duh.

Good Magazine.

Good help—pun unintended—is apparently really that hard to find.

It's pretty typical for companies to offer internal recruiting bonuses to anybody who can bring home a viable applicant that pans out. It wasn't until recently that media companies started offering up these kinds of bonuses (or at least at decent sizes) when they all started looking for engineers (one company this writer worked for offered up a $1,000 bonus for an iOS programmer to the entire company including editorial employees, which is more than any potential editorial bonus was worth).

But a media company taking the bounty to the public—and to Twitter—isn't something we've seen before...until now:

This probably isn't the first time this has ever happened, but it's one of the first instances we've seen of and/or heard of it from such a public, viable brand. For what it's worth, Good Magazine "partnered" with social networking service Jumo back in August; it was founded in 2006 by a then 26 year-old Ben Goldhirsh (entrepreneur Bernie Goldhirsh's son) and among their recruits including one Al Gore III, the son of America's Would-Be President. Despite criticism of their profit models, Good has not only managed to persist, but thrive due in no small part to angel funding and pivoting from being merely a media operation to an "integrated media platform" focused on social causes. They also produce a pretty quality product; between that and their deep pockets, this seems like a smart, crowdsourced version of spending money to make money. Upshot: Don't be surprised if larger, more prominent media brands follow suit in search of tech talent.

Over the last year, reports the New York Times, the number of want ads for highly technical positions has nearly doubled on the industry job board AdExchanger. The wave of big data is rich soil for advertising companies to mine, but it requires some serious quants to seperate the signal from the noise.

“The demand has far outstripped the supply,” said Joe Zawadzki, chief executive of MediaMath, told the NY Times. “The number of things that you need to know is high and the number of people that have grown up knowing it is low.”

It's stories like this that inspired Union Square Ventures to participate in the $2.5 million funding round for Code Academy last week. The irony of our current economic climate is that persistent unemployment sits alongside a growing hunger for workers skilled in computer science.

Mayor Bloomberg's plan to build a new engineering campus in New York will help in the long term. But it can't hope to keep up with demand. In the meantime, a host of new programs like General Assembly and Code Academy are going to begin filling in the cracks with a new breed of education for the new economy.

You probably can't afford the one on the right.

As if you weren't already scrounging meetups for every killer coder or future CTO, Dow Jones has some bad news to report. According to VentureWire, several VCs and angel investors say that failure to show up at a pitch meeting without tech talent on your roster could hurt your odds of raising funds. "These investors argue that hiring the best people requires connections, and that founders who don't have those connections will find that money is of limited use," says the article.

"You need a full complement of senior engineers," said Sanjay Subhedar, a managing director at Storm Ventures, which has delayed and in some cases denied funding for companies that don't have a strong technical leader or team. "If you need to hire eight to 10 engineers after the funding, do you know who these guys are? If you say yes, good. If you say no, it's very difficult."

The ability to hire skilled engineers goes beyond just the need for strong talent, some observers say. It reflects a founding team's overall ability to continue to identify and hire the talent needed to grow.

"With a tech team, it's not so much can they build [the product] themselves, but can they evaluate engineers in the future," said Thomas Korte, a former Google product evangelist who founded AngelPad, a mentorship program for young start-ups. "If you don't have the rock-star engineers to do that, then it's going to be very hard."

No pressure, though. Mr. Korte forgot to add.

Give me your tired, your (not) poor, your coding masses yearning to breathe free.

The folks at Focus have put together a handy infographic about earning potential in Silicon Valley where the number of jobs at internet companies (currently clocking in at 48,000) has surpassed the excesses of the dotcom boom. As Business Insider points out, the salaries listed (product and marketing managers make more than web developers and software engineers; Google engineers make more than those at Facebook and Twitter), don't account for stock-based compensation.

But the chart does delve into cost of living, typically an area where New York City loses out, although apparently not compared to the Valley.

The average tech salary in the Valley is around $92, 299 a year. Once you factor in the average price for a home in Silicon Valley (which is more than 191 percent above the national average) and the average apartment rent ($2,241/month or 76 percent higher than the national average) and California's 9.3 percent income tax on anyone making over $46,776 (New York state's rate is 6.85 percent on income between $20,001 and $200,000), Focus says become techies would have to earn just $74,808 for the same cost of living in New York City.

These numbers are all just for context because no one would ever leave New York City's burgeoning tech ecosystem for the Left Coast, right? Right?!

Update: Focus just reached out to Betabeat with another infographic comparing the Alley and the Valley. This one looks at the cost of operating a business in NYC vs. San Francisco. After examining everything from salaries to payroll tax to cost of utilities, Focus concludes, "San Francisco remains a more reasonable location to operate a business. Unless of course you plan to take your company public." That's because San Francisco's payroll tax counts employees cashing out stock options as gains. In Twitter's case, TechCrunch reported, if the company went public and raised $100 million, they would owe the city $75 million.

Like we said, keep on keepin' on. Nothing to see there, folks.

"During the dot-com boom we went from myself to 150 people," Kim told students from Harvard, Brown and MIT last week. "By January of 2002 we were down to four people. Should died, but instead bloody noses every day for 90 days, pushed on and grew the company up, we'll be close to 300 people by the end of this year."

Rebuilding the company in New York wasn't the advice of the experts. Ram Shriram, one of Google's earliest investors, told Kim point blank his company wouldn't succeed unless they moved out to Silicon Valley. Instead, Next Jump aggressively pursued engineers directly on their college campuses instead of poaching from their competition.

They invested in research and professors, huge intern classes, big competitions at schools and found it paid big dividends. "Arguably no other company is our space invested in college recruiting," said Kim. While it's obviously a bit of biased sample group, the majority of the engineers who attended the event said the Big Apple was now their top destination after college.

"What I'd like to figure out is how we can create a much more sustainable and much more robust pipeline of developers into the NYC innovation community and I'd like to propose a lofty goal to inspire some solutions," O'Donnell wrote on his blog.

Investor Fred Wilson took up the charge next. "Charlie O'Donnell has put forth a challenge to bring 250 new software developers this year to NYC. I think that's a good start but I'd like to see a bolder number, like 1,000 a year, or even more," Wilson wrote yesterday.

Now Nate Westheimer, organizer of the New York Tech Meetup, is taking the idea to the next level.

A thousand non-technical New Yorkers should learn to code, he said.

"For as long as I've been involved in the NY tech industry we've made cries for more engineers to a) move here; or, b) abandon/avoid Wall Street so they can join our silly startups that are 'changing the world.' What if instead of calling on others to do things we just looked to ourselves? Aren't we the change we are waiting for?" he wrote yesterday.

Westheimer is in the perfect position to say this. Until very recently, he was a NoPE—"Non-cOding Product Executive." But two months ago, he decided to learn Ruby on Rails and spent a week at his desk in a mental "sweat lodge," doing nothing else.

Since then, he's built a voting app for the New York Tech Meetup and a meeting schedule called Ohours. He also posted a guide to learning code.

Westheimer already has 51 comments on his post, "Can 1000 of us learn to code?" so far, many of them NoPEs saying "I'm in."

Sounds like a New Year's resolution! Sanford Dickert created a page on nextNY.org where hacker hopefuls can publicly commit to learn a programming language.

ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries