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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."
LEGO CAKE
Like a lot of kids, 9-year-old Katie Lemberg loves LEGOs.
In honor of her favorite locking blocks, Lemberg and her mom developed an ingenious concept, the LEGO party.
"It was great," Katie recalls. "None of the adults knew what it was--and all of the kids did."
Materials
1 13- x 9- x 2-inch sheet cake
8 cupcakes
White frosting
Food coloring (your choice of color)
Toothpicks
Step 1:
Turn the cake upside down and place the cupcakes on top as shown. Hold each cupcake in place with a toothpick.
Step 2:
Frost a bright color such as blue, red or yellow.
The best way to get a job like this would be to get some experience building stuff.
Legos are CHEAP on eBay available in bulk lots or even Complete mindstorms sets
And if not for you, buy them for your kids. Beats letting them rot their brains out watching TV all day.
Just watch out, stepping barefoot on a 2x2 lego in the middle of the night is worse than medieval caltrops.
3D Printing Tips and Tricks at Zheng3.com
They also interviewed a bunch of little kids who were all very uninterested in Legos. What a shame...
It really is a shame. Legos got me interested in a career in engineering, which in turn got me interested in the sciences at a rather young age. Hell I still consider Legos to be pretty cool especially the mindstorms kits and I am 19.
If you're doing Lego-Mindstorms development, consider the Ruby Lego-Mindstorms development kit.
Ruby's a nifty language and is (I think, anyway) well suited to stuff like this.
The Army reading list
This is, ok a bit off topic but the current mars lander has lego on board, with a photo of it here as part of an experiment
But I've been to two Legolands, and I knew better than to even consider applying.
Let me give you some background: an entire room of my domicile is devoted to Lego. (Well, it's a walk-in closet, but it's a big walk-in closet...) Just my unsorted Lego fills 50 gallons of storage tubs, plus some. Sorted, I have organizers with well over five hundred small drawers of little parts, so I can always find what I need. I'm pretty ridiculous when it comes to Lego. I can build some pretty cool stuff.
But after going to Legoland in Windsor, I realized the master builders are so out of my league it ain't even a contest. I'm not worthy to carry these guys' baseplates. The stuff these people do is mind-boggling. Stunning. Amazing.
Every self-respecting geek may know about it, but almost all of us are gonna have to settle for ooohing and aaaahing at whoever does get the job and the spectacular stuff this person can build.
When I was in college taking my technical writing course (required, which I think is a good thing) the teacher gave us a in class project. She handed out a small baggie of lego, maybe 10 pieces each, and told us to make whatever we wanted in groups of 4. We then had to document what we made and how to reassemble it. Then take it apart, hand the baggie and instructions to another group, and see how they do.
Nobody got anywhere close.
The funny thing was that she had previously taught an English 1001 course. One of the first writing assignments she gave was to ask "What was your favorite childhood toy?"
She'll never give that assignment again. Not at an engineering college. She got to read 30 essays extolling the virtues of Lego, how they inspired creativity and building, and how all the newer sets suck because they have overly specific pieces.
I wasn't in that class, but I suspect my essay would've been similar. Lego just rocks. My first child is due in a month and we already have some of the newborn Lego stuff. My sister gave me a bag full of Duplo blocks (many of which came from me) since her kids have outgrown them, and I'll give them to my kid when she's capable of using them.
Honestly... I'd much rather see a kid playing with blocks or lego than with most of the electronic toys nowadays. For one thing, they're far quieter... and they don't need batteries (although you can some sets with them nowadays -- which I only dreamed of when I was a kid).
I have Jurassic Park legos strewn all over my office. My ofc has become a part time dinosaur preserve.
Last year it was Star Wars. Now it'd Dinosaurs.
My wife ONLY buys Legos when they're on clearance though. They drop to about 40% of their original price ($7 vs. $20, by waiting a few months).
Kind of reminds me of Herb Ritts (the late fashion photographer). As well as lighting technicians, reflector holders and makeup artists, he had an assistant simply to raise his heavy Pentax 6x7 to his eye - all he had to do was squint through it and take the shot. Now *that's* when you know you're at the top of your profession.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Would probably be when I was 7 or 8 my neighour and I made an entire city out of lego, at the time I was also ripping apart anything electronic that I could get my hands on so the city had working street lights (leds I got from an answering machine), a loudspeaker in the middle of the square (some speaker I got from somewhere that we played music to the plebes on) and ...... a monorail! the monorail was the triumph. Of course it was more like a bus (it had wheels) which rode on a track which was supported on posts, it was still a monorail.
History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it - Sir Winston Churchill
About 10 years ago, I used to build real swimming ships out of those really old Lego bricks and plates (the plates aren't available anymore) my mother and my aunt used for playing when they were kids (the bricks must be at least 35 years old). And now, those ships with those specialised bricks don't swim anymore. This really sucks.
A monkey is doing the real work for me.
Like this:
Lego Beretta
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
We went out to shop for my little cousin's birthday a few months ago, and figured Lego was a great idea. I had been raised on it, and we all know it's the one toy that never gets old because of the endless possibilities.
But now it seems it's impossible to buy a set that isn't "themed" with dozens of proprietary parts that only really work within their designated set. Any attempt to mix sets now results in even more of a Frankenstein creation than I remember being possible when I was a kid. We eventually gave up, realizing that (as other posters have pointed out) the only way to get a real good "set" of Lego is to buy bulk on e-Bay.
Moral of the story, whatever you do, DO NOT throw old Lego away. The primary color simple blocks don't come in regular sets anymore, but are probably the most valuable pieces around (and I don't mean in terms of cash value).
It's also durable as heck...only the pieces I used as chew toys to help me focus on building (kind of like gum, but much grosser) are any the worse for wear over the years.
When we were kids, really, Lego was one of the few ways kids had of making stuff in 3D...sort of like a physical CAD system. (Which is why I liked having space sets w/ lots of cool wings and engines and ain't one of those people longing for the days of basic bricks only...and I liked space because while we know things today and stuff in castles of yesterday aren't generally covered with little dots, in the future, they might be!)
Now a days I suppose kids have more options, like modelling stuff on computer...not that many do that, but I know a few.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
I know that there's a whole cultural experience around blogging that includes acronyms, but the inapproriate punctuation and grammar shows that this candidate lacks communications skills.
Will this disqualify him from this particular job? Perhaps, perhaps not. What it means is that it is unlikely that this candidate has what it takes to grow beyond that role.
Communications skills and people skills are what determine the influence that you can have within an organization.
Have you been the victim of unfair promotion within the workplace? Have you seen people with lesser skills move ahead?
It's probable that the reason behind this "crazy" promotion is that your written and verbal communications combined with your ability to get along with and/or lead people are somewhat less than those of the person promoted past you.
The "Big Lie" that we geeks tell ourselves is that intelligence and technical prowess alone are the determining factors in career growth. They are not the most important factors. I'll share a recent insightful quote:
"The one who knows 'how' will always have a job. The one why knows 'why' will always be his boss." (Maxwell, Thinking for a Change)
Practice in blogging skills like his is unlikely to help develop skills needed for career growth.
Respectfully,
Anomaly
BTW - God loves you and longs for relationship with you. If you want to know more, please email me.
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
I've been using the MLCAD software for some time now. It comes with almost all the bricks in existence, so if you've got a year or two to spare, you might want to check it out.
To which he replied "Try living on $7 bucks an hour"
Well, it's gone up since then at least -- it's $13-15/hour now. See here or here.
That said, $13-15/hour isn't going to be a whole lot of money if you're living in So. Cal. -- it's livable, but you're not going to be buying a lot of toys (except lego obviously) or live in a big house (unless you make it out of the aforementioned lego).
Based on the "Lego Master Builder" FAQ page (here's a Google cache, since the main is toast) there are decent benefits as well, plus some travel (which probably means a good bit of travel, for which you'd be paid extra).
Whether or not you can live on that money is obviously dependant on lifestyle and other income, but, hey -- it still is a dream job (if you like Lego).
Like many of the stories here I used to quickly disregard the instructions for any set and compile all my kits to build bigger and better things.
Space Shuttles with working bay doors, landing year, robotic arm.
Guns of all makes, and a working crossbow. I used the lances from the castle kits as the bolts, very cool and would cause some bodily harm if you shot it at your 4 year-old neighbor.
My biggest creations were always massive submarines. They would have between 4 and 6 torpedo tubes (I would use the shock absorbers from the technic cars to launch the torpedoes) and missile tubes. I would also build primitive propellors and drive them with model rubber bands. The big problem was always flotation. All that air trapped inside the sealed blocks caused a problem. The solution for me turned out to be a coin slot on both ends. I would weight the thing down with various coins just to make it go below the surface (had to have a 'bank' on both ends to keep it level). I build these things up until I was about 14 with the longest one being 5 feet.
Now I have a 2 year old and I play with his Duplos. Can't wait to get him the regular kits. I still buy the Technic kits of Formula 1 cars (Ferrari, Jordan, McLaren, Williams) even though most of them are the same kit at a different scale and with different colors.
Yeah, well, if you mean 'simple, shallow-fashion oriented' stuff for girls because Building, Engineering and Design are Men's Work(TM) -- then Lego can keep there shitty crap away from my daughter (who dosnt exist yet...).
If you want to pursue this idea, try to get in contact with the guy at this site:
Lego Computing
Check out the images album link on the right hand side - this guy at one time was planning/building a lego based computer. He had various components built, but hadn't tied all of it together. The images area shows some interesting details/designs...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
It's already been widely reported that Lego has fired their chief operating officer, the guy responsible for all the marketing ploys, and are returning to basics. They specifically mention that they are reverting to basic building blocks like they used to. I'm looking forward to a revival of the era in the 80s, which was a pleasant mix of both basic building blocks and themed sets that were still composed of generic enough parts to use them for anything else you wanted to build (i.e., simple spaceships, racetracks, and pirate ships).
"Sufferin' succotash."