An insight into what motivates, drives and inspires us at LEGO.com
A collection of anecdotes from our Direct Shopper Technology team at The LEGO Group.
Looking around at our engineering team is pretty amazing in terms of how diverse we are in so many ways such as gender, nationality, educational background and career path just to name a few. Only a short time ago all of these scales have been and still are used to define a “typical” IT department or an engineering team. With the push for a more diverse workforce and the reported and well blogged benefits that it brings, there is progress being made towards these aspects becoming less important for hiring and more recognition of a candidate’s attitude, interest and willingness to learn and take pride in what they do.
While there’s a lot of progress still to be made in how roles are advertised and how we actually reach out to potential candidate pools as an industry, we want to do our part to break down the social/stereotypical barriers to joining the IT/Engineering industries.
We thought it would be interesting to ask the team for one piece of advice or inspiration that has made a lasting impact or impression on them. Hopefully some of these resonate with you and if you’re interested in joining the IT industry then hopefully we can inspire or motivate more engineers into the industry as social stereotypes shouldn’t be the thing holding you back.
Here’s a peek into our motivations, drives and inspirations.
“Curiouser and curiouser”
Proud Romanian in a land of opportunities, Woman in tech sharpening my programming skills in the Engineering team at the LEGO Group.
Having studied Public Relations at uni, I kind of fell into tech; after moving to the UK, building up a network and showing interest helped massively.
A positive effect of being a former communist country, children in Romania -particularly — benefit from equal encouragement to succeed at school, regardless of gender. Building a career and engineering of any kind is a highly regarded achievement, making parents proud. :)
My instinct has always been that I belonged in a world of Hard Sciences and solving problems. Moving to the UK and changing that environment meant it was harder to find mentors or role models in the industry.
There used to be a lack of awareness on how to start learning without having a technical background, as well. This made it harder to approach any coding / programming notions in order to start practicing.
Driven by curiosity, I’ve followed codefirst:girls webdev intro courses, which allowed me to transition from a Content & Product role into Developing applications — first for mobile, then mostly web. This only happened in the last 5–6 years.
This has taught me to dream big and take chances, be entitled to ask questions and educate myself about opportunities and areas of learning & improving.
“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life” — Confucius (Probably)
I am a software developer, with a Computer Science degree, originally from the Canary Islands, Spain, running away from all that’s sunny, apparently. I’m a Senior Application Engineer at the LEGO Group.
The challenge of solving problems is something I love and I have found a career that lets me do this every day, in this case, coding.
In one of my first jobs, I had to maintain a really old ERP app, so improving the app or just solving bugs made our users very happy, which in turn made me realise how much I enjoyed it, helping others to do their jobs more easily.
I am lucky enough to work in something I love, so I’ve never said: “I don’t want to go to work today”.
Probably because I love gaming, I tend to approach programming as a game, so if I’m stuck trying to solve something, it’s normal to see me at 3am coding because I want to “beat” it.
Our job is to solve problems using code, not coding itself.
Don’t be afraid to “jump” into the IT world. Just because you don’t know something, it doesn’t mean it is super complicated. It’s just a matter of time and experience.
“Start before you’re ready”
I am an asian woman from New Zealand with an Engineering degree in Mechatronics, now Senior Infrastructure Engineer at the Lego Group.
I had the opportunity to attend a luncheon back in 2016 where one of the speakers was sharing three “mottos” that they live by and had helped them with their success. The one that has stuck with me all this time is “start before you’re ready”.
No one is ever ready for any new thing and it’s new things that help you grow and succeed. This motto has had me doing crazy things for the last few years from doing tough mudder and spartan races to learning to run and more recently moving to the other side of the globe for a senior engineering role and volunteering to speak at first a meet-up and then a conference!
I started out in consulting and the main metaphor they love to use is the Swan, calm and graceful on the surface but feet frantically paddling below the waterline. That’s exactly how it feels when you first start before you’re ready but you break down what needs to be done, get together some friends together or find a mentor and then go!
“Reduce a problem into its smallest part”
I’m a Software Engineer who entered the industry by attending as many free evening tech meet-ups as I could, and sharing what I had learnt on social media. This enabled me to establish enough connections to build a business making prototypes of software for early stage start-ups.
This advice was given to me in a technical context. I learnt to approach problems by first understanding how to build a minimal sandbox environment. Within this environment, I then recreate the issue; the key is identifying precisely which pieces are not working, and adding nothing more. It is from this starting point that I begin iterating on programming challenges.
I cannot exaggerate enough the usefulness of this approach when I started with HTML/CSS. It has also provided me with a foundation from which to unpick issues in a large-scale commercial codebase which are deeply entrenched.
Finally, I’ve found this advice helpful in life more generally. Learning a skill as difficult as programming to a standard where I could earn a living from doing so was a process of asking several hard and fundamental questions of myself. I have learnt to be extremely specific in identifying what I value or feel I lack, understanding why it matters to me, and then allowing myself the space and time to implement gradual changes. I now see progress as a day by day process of consistent, arduous, incremental practice.
Pair, Pair and Pair Some More!
I’m an Application Engineer working for The LEGO Group
Starting something new can be daunting for all of us. We are stepping out into the unknown and can feel uncomfortable, unknowledgeable and unsure that we will ever be able to master all of the concepts that lay before us. Luckily for us all the paths are well trodden and there is a vast amount of people with the knowledge to help us, and most importantly — they are happy to share it!
I first started at the LEGO Group as a Junior Application Engineer feeling all of the above. I was lucky enough to be surrounded by super knowledgeable engineers who would take the time to pair program with me when I got a little overwhelmed or didn’t have the knowledge to solve a problem. I believe this was the greatest help to me in my career and still is today, however it is a tightrope as an over reliance on more experienced engineers can be detrimental to a new engineer’s progression. Take the time to attempt to solve problems on your own before reaching out for help.
Help can be found in many places and is not restricted just to the workplace. There are many code camps and online communities where the sharing of knowledge is actively encouraged. Never be afraid to be inquisitive and ask questions. We are all better together!
“It gets easier. Every day it gets a little easier. But you gotta do it every day. That’s the hard part. But it does get easier.” — Jogging Baboon to BoJack Horseman
I’m a latino living in London. Working in the tech industry for almost 8 years and now as a Senior Infrastructure Engineer at The Lego Group focused on DevOps.
Since I was a little kid I always loved to create things. I wanted to be an inventor. Later on I’ve realised that there is no such profession as ‘inventor’.
That was the main reason why I decided to make a career in tech. I could create little silly things and that made me happy. Nowadays, I usually work on small personal projects. One of them will be available soon so keep an eye on social media.
Now I’m working as a DevOps engineer moving and inspiring the team to work on the operations side of technology. Implementing new tools, working closely with the developer to improve their experience and focusing on the reliability of the platform is a hard feat. That’s where my quote comes in. It’s hard but it get’s easy with time, but you have to do it everyday.
A Flashback into the Future!
From an evolutionary dreamer!
As a Civil Engineer who then studied to become a Software Engineer, I soon realised that the architectural patterns and complexities are not just for engineering but common in all walks of human life. One important thing I was taught as a young engineer was to find simplicity in every complex problem. It took many years to understand the meaning of it and I am still searching for that simplicity in complexity!
Generations and technologies fade fast. One thing that keeps us fresh is our mind, along with that our hunger to learn. Moving away from the days of procedural programming was hard but the promise of object orientation opened opportunities. New technologies brought distributed computing closer to everyone. Web services and the explosion of cloud are all part of software engineering’s evolutionary wagon wheel.
Joining The LEGO Group to help LEGO.com on its migration journey to microservices, didn’t initially pan out as I expected. There is a saying, “good things happen to those who wait patiently”. The technology realisation and enablement across the organisation soon paved the way to accelerate into cloud and adopt serverless technologies — the current phase of the IT evolution.
I am excited and extremely happy to be part of this journey and getting myself ready to onboard the next phase, that could be just above that cloud cover!
“Build towards a better world”
I’m a massive LEGO mindset fan from Hungary, working for The LEGO Group as an Application Engineer.
I was always a LEGO brand fan, when I joined the company one of my dreams came true. I was granted the ability to add value to the whole brand, as an engineer, not just as a customer.
My motivation is to live in a better world. LEGO bricks are one of the best tools of our world to teach our children to learn fine motor skills, understand manuals (maps), improve 3D vision, develop imagination, socialise with others. These children will make our future vehicles, building and tools. I’m happy to work on the official LEGO.com platform to deliver this opportunity for these explorers.
We have all come from different backgrounds at different times in our careers and we all contribute to an amazing engineering team behind LEGO.com. Hopefully one or more of our anecdotes resonates with you and takes you on to achieve great things.
