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Inside the Lego Master Builder Search
blackdefiance writes "As most self-respecting geeks know, Lego is currently searching for a new Master Builder to hold the enviable position of building with Lego all day and getting paid for the privilege. One applicant describes the nerve-wracking experience of going through the first-round interview."
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Seems like I have witnessed the downfall of my only childhood toy (save a bike). Once legos involved hours of building.. stacking little peices together to form only the boat's haul. Now you get a boat and it comes with the haul peice, the mast peice and the rudder peice. Oh yeah the little figure with the 5'oclock shadow and eye-patch.
Where's the imagination and ability to shift around that? I loose the freedom to go my own direction. all the set levels have gone this direction over the years and I miss the old 40 page manuals and endless posibilities you could do on your own after that.
This last christmas I was buying legos for a young cousin of mine. I wanted to just get common or plain pieces so that he, my cousin, could design his own things. I remember dumping out a large container of legos, mostly 8, 4, and 2 connector pieces. I would be able to create just about anything I could imagine. Now Lego seems to sell more specialized kits. In that I mean they have a lot more preformed large plastic pieces that are only good for that specific set. They also have been pushing a lot more advertising type sets based on movies, tv shows and what not. What ever happened to Race day set or giant pirate ship made out of 8,4,2's and a flat base? /rant off
There is or can be built a machine that can simulate any physical object. -Church-Turing principle
Didn't hear about the firing, but I did hear about the financial trouble. Sad, because I used to love Lego in all its forms. (sigh)
So I started thinking, "I wonder what happened to all that lego?", and it turns out that my mom still has all of it, in some big plastic boxes in the attic. A quick survey reveals that this is the fate of all lego - it's never thrown away! It just gets kept because everyone remembers how cool it was and wants to keep it for their kids. (Or in my case, my little sister got it as hand-me-downs.) I bet it's one of the few toys of which this can be said, although I don't plan to trawl through landfill sights comparing the frequencies of Barbie-parts and lego-bricks. Anyone?
So, that's my theory as to why it's not selling. Plus it all went downhill when they started cashing in on franchises. I had spaceships and castles and that was good enough for me, dammit!
These sigs are more interesting tha
Have you been to a movie recently? Every one I've been to in the past couple of years has been prefixed with a Lego ad of some sort. Before, they were mostly Bionicle(*spit*) ads, but recently it's been for their new creator / designer / inventer sets.
These new lines make me feel more secure for Lego's future -- for a while, they were very distracted by "action toys", instead of focusing on the one thing they do better than anything else: making supplies for *creative* building. It looks like someone inside has finally realized that if they're trying to be just another action figure company, they're going to die, and that the emphasis must be on *actual building sets*.
As for the prices -- yeah, they're a pretty expensive toy, but the quality is much higher than one gets with clones.
If you really knew better, you'd have applied anyways... and let the chips fall where they may.
The worst they can do is say no, or not call on you at all.
Why turn down or reject yourself for a position that you aren't even making the hiring decision for? I know that when you apply for a job you really want, it's difficult to avoid getting your hopes up, and when it doesn't pan out there's a sense of disappointment, but in the end you are really no worse off... in fact, you would still be better off than before because you exhibited the self confidence in the first place to dare to even apply, which is a highly transferrable skill and will make it that much more likely that you'd be able to land your dream job in the future.
Don't sell yourself short.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
This is the Slashdot mentality that also thinks management jobs are easy.
Building Lego professionally is one of the most difficult tasks out there. The amount of material needed to build displays for shows, events and parks goes beyond what you can buy off Ebay because "Legos are cheap".
Imagine someone saying that writing code or administrating a LAN is easy because gcc is free or network hubs are cheap.
"Don't sell yourself short."
Plus, they might be out of your league for now, but what about when you're spending 50 hours a week building the damn things?
OddManIn: A Game of guns and game theory.
I had to have wasted 5 minutes of my time just thinking.
I find this statement strange. These 5 minutes of thinking probably scored him double with the interviewers.
When I was a Patternmaker I would typically spend 8 hours (1 whole day) thinking about the job before I started it. Most jobs would take 400 hours so this was still a small amount of time in my mind.
Rushing to start a job just leads to mistakes when you are building something big and complex like a Lego model or a set of 50 tonne press tools.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
One thing is, a lot of the jobs at Legolands seem to involve using Legos as 3D pixels, essentially, with a lot less chances for clever "small" work.
I have been more impressed with the creativity shown in whoever designs the sets...the new designer stuff w/ all the joints, some of the Mechs from the Mars series, and the tiny-scale Star Wars stuff are all very cool. (Admittedly the tiny-scale Star Wars stuff I'd seen on the web before, but its definately a nice contrast to the usual minifig scale works)
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Perhaps the person who posted the article here to Slashdot is the real genius, pointing the world to the innocent, excited applicant's blog so the LEGO people can dash his dreams away, hence freeing up the job for "ikewillis".
You're a shrewd one, ikewillis.
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
I blame the over-use of specialized pieces. Heck, when I was constantly building LEGO assemblies the most specialized piece was the human figures. Now many LEGO packages are made up of human figures, a contoured bottom, and two or three pieces to complete the set. I realize creativety is lacking these days, but who wants to buy LEGOs to assemble a whole 3 or 4 pieces?
If they sold big boxes of plain, straightforward assorted bricks I'd be happy, but all I can ever find are the kits, which rarely contain any actual Lego bricks.