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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
Google cache links:
: www.legomasterbuilder.com/+&hl=en&ie=UTF-8
http://216.239.39.104/search?q=cache:O-j4lnUvtb8J
Blogzine.net
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).
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
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?
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
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.
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...
Lego, expecting worst loss in its history, fires two executives, ponders layoffs
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