Category Archives: Mentoring & Other Business

The annual SEED
mentoring program Spring event starts with a dinner on Monday
night, followed by a day of talks and tours on Tuesday, 21 April.
We have 70 registered to participate so far:

• 51 will be there in person, traveling from Australia, Austria, Czech Republic, France, Russia, Spain, USA (Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Texas)
• 19 are participating remotely, joining the meeting from France, Germany, India, Netherlands, Singapore, UK, USA (Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, Texas)

Since 14 April, SEED
and PreSEED have been receiving applications from Sun Engineering
staff to join the worldwide mentoring program. All application materials
are due 30 April 2009 for both terms. What we have so far:

• PreSEED term
• 31 PreSEED applicants
• 12 complete applications
• Applications from: China (Beijing, Chengdu), Czech Republic (Prague), India (Bangalore), Japan (Tokyo), Russia (St. Petersburg), USA (California, Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Oregon, Pennsylvania, & Texas)
• Global Sales and Service SEED term
• 5 GSS SEED applicants
• 1 complete application
• Applications from: Belgium (Zaventem), France (Velizy), USA (California, Maryland, Virginia)

The GSS term participants will be chosen by an executive Selection
Committee. 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.

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.

Peter Ryan, Sun’s Executive Vice President for Global Sales & Services,
today announced the opening of applications for the second GSS worldwide
SEED mentoring term.
The application period ends 30 April 2009.
The first GSS mentoring term started in January; this second
term will run from 15 June. The SEED program has been working to develop
the two GSS-only terms with 13-time SEED mentor

Hal Stern (Vice President, Global Systems Engineering, GSS)
for about a year. It is good to get this announced!

Just about two hours ago, I sent out the world-wide all-Engineering
announcement that Sun’s new PreSEED mentoring term is accepting
applications from today through 30 April. We linked up the overview
pages a few days ago so potential applicants could review the material
and get ready.

The SEED program
ran two pilots to test out PreSEED in 2008. This is our second regular
PreSEED term.
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.

PreSEED has a time-based acceptance process (we take
the first 50 with complete and verified applications), so I was not
surprised to see applications start arriving quickly. So far, eight
have come in and one is already complete. Lots of email questions too…

Fifty people have already registered for the 21 April event
hosted in Menlo Park, California, by the
SEED worldwide Engineering mentoring program. Speakers for SEED’s
annual Spring Event:

• The keynote speaker is SEED’s executive sponsor,
  Sun’s Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of Research
  and Development,
  
  Greg Papadopoulos
• Software Engineering Director
  
  Meenakshi Kaul-Basu will lead a Sun Open Source Discussion Panel
  including experts on OpenSolaris,
  OpenStorage,
  OpenSPARC, and
  GlassFish
• Principal Investigator
  
  Stephen Uhler will talk about his
  
  ePBX Project in Sun Labs

In addition, there will be afternoon tours and a SEED dinner.