The worldwide Sun Engineering email announcement from Sun CTO
Greg Papadopoulos went out on 9 November and we have so far
received 8 applications for the SEED Established Staff term. SEED program
participants are expected to rise to the top of Sun Engineering’s
individual contributor or management ranks. All application materials
are due on 24 November. The term will run January 15 – June 15, 2007.
We plan to accept about 40 participants.
Tomorrow is the first of three phone-in question and answer sessions
we have scheduled for potential applicants and their managers.
Tanya Jankot and I are worried about the tight timing of this application
period. We usually start earlier in November but with managing Sun’s involvement in
the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women
in Computing (October 4-7, 2006 in San Diego), shortly followed by the world-wide
SEED Event (24-25 October 2006 in Menlo Park), we have been busy. We allowed
over two weeks for the application period but for the US-based Sun staff, that
time includes the hard-to-get-any-work-done 2 days during Thanksgiving.
The problem is that in the US, the winter holidays come so fast after Thanksgiving
that from now, what with family travel, distracting-if-fun parties, and official
days off, there are only really five working weeks left in 2006. SEED needs
a week to verify application data and then pick the participants. The participants
need a week to prepare their 15 name Mentor Wish Lists. Also, we want to include at
least two weeks of mentor matching time in before 2007. This is a very close schedule.
SEED runs into this problem for every term we run. We maintain a World Schedule to
avoid national, religious, and company holidays as best we can but we still
ended up with the term for India running into Divali, the term for China overlapping Labor Day, the term for Russia starting during Russian Orthodox Christmas,
and the annual SEED event getting too close to Rosh Hashana. Every term, we
get pleas for extensions to respect or allow for one event, holiday, observance, or
another. We long ago decided that no time is convenient for everyone.
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