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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."
They should look at hiring this guy. The comedy more than makes up for any lack of technical skill.
They also interviewed a bunch of little kids who were all very uninterested in Legos. What a shame...
People say I'm crazy, I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes...
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.
...Zack, the Legomaniac? I think he's available.
Ok, enough with those bionicle, tenticle, barbie Lego sets. They need to release a line of Lego toys like no other. Call it "Lego gun set", when you get to assemble M-16, AK-47 and rocket propell grenades with Lego blocks.
Of course they don't actually fire, but wouldn't some kid feel great loading clips and clips of ammo and tweaking with sniper scopes. Hey you can even have belts of ammo so kids walk around the living room feeling like Rambo.
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
"The top model builders from each city will be invited to Legoland California in Carlsbad for a chance to become the eighth Lego master model builder and build and maintain the huge Lego sculptures in the park. The winner will be paid $13 to $15 an hour."
Thats pretty good pay for doing something you were do at the age of 5, or for some of us still doing today.
Clicky (Washingtonpost.com)
- It is easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them. - Alfred Adler -
Google cache links:
: www.legomasterbuilder.com/+&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
http://216.239.39.104/search?q=cache:O-j4lnUvtb8J
Blogzine.net
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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
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.
Post about it, including detailed notes about the process and interviewers, on the internet. Then, just to make sure it gets maximum attention, send the link to a large news page. Seriously - this is not going to help the guy get the job.
This has got to be in the top 5 Coolest Slacker Jobs...right up there with "Beer Taster" at Budweiser.
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).
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.
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
So the interview with LEGO was Saturday...
:)
:)
Ugh, my nerves were all over the place. I ended up re-writing my cover letter prolly 6 or 8 times Saturday morning before finally heading up to Boston with my belly full of butterflies--and Smores Cereal
The setup for the whole event was pretty cool. They had very impressive LEGO models all over and filled the place with people wearing LEGO shirts. It was nearly impossible to tell who was from LEGO and who worked at the college hosting it.
So I show up and register and am told to go into this room where I can mingle with some of the other applicants and LEGO folk. They had two buckets of brick which they explained could be used if I needed to "warm up" for the building challenge which was about to take place. OMG, if only they knew that I had been up the whole night before building like a bandit, trying to prepare for anything they could throw at me...lol
I ended up swimming my hands through the pieces anyways. At first it was just for a soothing moment of Zen, but then it ended up turning into a full-blown building event once a little kid that someone had brought along started building with me. We had a blast. He had a modified foam beer can holder over one of his wrists which he said helped him build. It's always fun to see Budweiser helping to foster children's imaginations.
As we're building, one of the LEGO shirts comes over and joins us. Then this other girl in a LEGO shirt stands behind him and watches too. Then another applicant sits down at my table too and began to build. We all had some small talk and smiles and then another LEGO shirt comes out of the blue and asks me if I'm ready for my building challenge. Oh, ya betcha!
I get escorted with applicant #10 to another room. (They gave us all numbers during registration-I was #9. Damn, I wanted to meet #2 so badly!) There were two chairs at a table with two separate covered buckets each containing 2000 basic bricks.
"Don't worry about color--We're more interested in how you build and what you build rather than how well the colors match up" announced Pat who was in charge of the competition. He then says "The theme is sports. You have 45 minutes-Go!"
Sports?!?! Of all the frikken topics, I get SPORTS???
#10 immediately lights up and starts feverishly building away. Again, I start swimming my fingers through the bricks before me-but this time I'm swimming like I've just been shipwrecked with my fingers searching for a lifesaver of an idea to build.
I had to have wasted 5 minutes of my time just thinking. I looked down at the green base plate and immediately thought about building Fenway Park. I mean the baseball diamond was already there. All I'd need to do was build the walls around it. That was too easy, though and I knew it would be tough to make it interesting given the bricks I had to work with. So scratching my head and kinda sneaking out a smile and a laugh in the otherwise sterile room, I figured why not build a mascot. I have lots of yellow and black brick--I'll build a bumble-bee mascot.
Ok, ok, I know you're prolly thinking who the hell are the Bumble-Bees??? I have no idea either, but I figured it had to make sense somewhere in the country. Maybe it was an expansion team along the Mexican Boarder. I didn't care-it was going to work!
45 minutes later, Pat comes back in and starts talking to #10 about his creation:
"So, it looks like you made a baseball park-is that the green wall here at Fenway?" LOL...OMG, I thought that was too funny that he had actually built what I almost built. It was pretty decent, but again, the details were hard to make out and with the exception of the green monster the colors definitely worked against it. He asked a few questions and then invited the guy to head back to the mingling room where he was welcome to check out some more of the models before he could head home. He says "will be in touch soon." #10 leaves relieved.
Then Pat
I met someguy a few years back on an cms implementation project who told me he used to be a professional lego builder building the various large scale models found in their stores.
I (thinking it was a dream job) replied: "Wow. What a dream job. Why did you stop?"
To which he replied "Try living on $7 bucks an hour"
My first task as Master Builder would be to reinstate the Hard Core lego set. Makes a great gift!
-3Suns
~~~~
The Revolution will be Slashdotted
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.
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).
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?
BTW, 'Clikits' is much too phonetically similar to a word that ends with 'oris'
Lego Spirit Rover
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
We've all heard the standard flamewars:
vi vs Emacs;
Gnome vs KDE;
Linux vs BSD;
Free vs Open;
Windows vs Anything.
Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to present the granddaddy of them all...
Lego vs Meccano
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.
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I recently read another guy's story at his journey to try and win the Master Builder position. You can find it here.
Do not read this sig.
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.
One thing they are starting to do is find ways to sells Legos to girls. They have something called Lego Click-its, which are basically build your own jewerly kits made out of specialized tiny Legos. My daughter loves the things. Stuff like that gives me hope for the company.
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...).
Toss the instructions, dump the contents of the new kit into the common bucket, and build away.
But... make sure the common bucket doesn't look like a cat litter box. I have bad childhood memories of digging around in the lego box only to find the cat had been there first...
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."
Lego, expecting worst loss in its history, fires two executives, ponders layoffs
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