Yesterday, I sent out the world-wide all-Engineering
announcement that Sun’s new PreSEED mentoring term is accepting
applications through 30 April. We have 21 applicants
already; 7 of the applications are complete. PreSEED has a time-based
acceptance process: we will take the first 50 with complete and verified
applications. During the most recent PreSEED term in 2008, the first
50 applications were completed by the 12th day of the application period.
One way to think of PreSEED is as a preliminary to Sun’s successful
SEED Engineering mentoring program. Since 2001, the CTO-sponsored SEED program has a proven track record of strong diversity, very high satisfaction, high regard by management, and high retention. SEED participants as a group earn more promotions and higher performance ratings than Sun overall. Of course, individual experiences
will vary.
We set up PreSEED with a time-based acceptance rather than a content-based system like SEED’s to accommodate PreSEED’s target population: Members of Sun’s Technical Staff who have been getting almost all “Sun Standard” (2 or Standard-level) performance ratings. Other aspects of PreSEED (such as the required preliminary discussion between mentee and manager, the required training of mentor-mentee, and the option of joining SEED in the future) are also part of the program because PreSEED’s participants are often more junior in terms of professional accomplishment than are SEED’s. Since many of the PreSEED applicants are at about the same level of career achievement, we created an acceptance system that did not focus on small or potentially-arbitrary differences in accomplishment. Thus, the time-based acceptances.
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