Category Archives: Mentoring & Other Business

We are in the mentor matching cycle for the second PreSEED term. So far,
48 out of the 52 are matched (92%) since the cycle started on 5 May. This
term officially starts in June and runs through December 2008. The newly
matched mentors are now having their preliminary meetings with the mentee’s
managers and the mentor-mentee pairs are going through their two hour
training sessions as those are scheduled.

The SEED program is also now accepting applications from Sun Engineering
staff worldwide for its Recent Hire and Established Staff terms which
will start in September 2008. (The next PreSEED term does not start until
January 2009.)

To date, we have 47 SEED applications, 8 of which
are complete. All materials are due by 9 June. SEED has applications
from Sun Engineering staff working in Czech Republic, India, Ireland,
Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, P.R. China, Russia, Saudi Arabia,
Switzerland, Taiwan, the UK, and the USA. They work for Sun Labs, Microelectronics,
Global Sales and Services, Software, Storage, Systems, and Worldwide Operations.

More information on the SEED worldwide Engineering mentoring program is available at

http://research.sun.com/SEED/

We are in the mentor matching cycle for the second PreSEED term. So far,
46 out of the 52 are matched (88%) since the cycle started on 5 May. This
term officially starts in June and runs through December 2008. The newly
matched mentors are now having their preliminary meetings with the mentee’s
managers and the mentor-mentee pairs are going through their two hour
training sessions as those are scheduled.

The SEED program is also now accepting applications from Sun Engineering
staff worldwide for its Recent Hire and Established Staff terms which
will start in September 2008. To date, we have 32 applications, 4 of which
are complete. All materials are due by 9 June. SEED has applicants from
China, India, Ireland, Israel, Russia, the UK, and the USA so far.

More information on the SEED worldwide Engineering mentoring program is available at

http://research.sun.com/SEED/

Today

Greg Papadopoulos, Sun’s CTO and Executive Vice President of Research and Development, as the sponsor for Engineering’s worldwide mentoring program,
sent out his announcement that the 2008-2009 SEED terms will be open for
applications from 21 May – 9 June 2008. As I wrote in my
May 10, 2008 blog, as of Greg’s announcement today, we have integrated PreSEED
with the Recent Hire and Established staff groups offered by the SEED program.
The 2008-2009 terms just announced are for Recent Hire and Established
staff groups. The next regular worldwide all-Engineering PreSEED term will be offered
January-June 2009 (with applications in November 2008).

The SEED program now has coverage for all of the exempt grades in Engineering, which
it didn’t before. This sounds like a small change but it took Tanya Jankot and me
months of tool redesign and rewriting of the process documents to be sure that
everything was covered and made sense. Now for the live test of a worldwide
all-Engineering application period…

More information on the SEED worldwide Engineering mentoring program is available at

http://research.sun.com/SEED/

We are in the mentor matching cycle for the 52 PreSEED participants.
I sent out the first mentor request emails on 5 May; I have 36
match confirmations so far this morning (69% done in the first 2 weeks).
This matching cycle is a little slower than usual because of

JavaOne happening during the first week. Not only were people too
busy to reply, some of them also had travel days when they were out of touch.
Normally, I would expect the term to be about 75% to 80% matched by now.

All of the unmatched participants are being considered by potential mentors and I
plan to finish all of the matches within the next month.

More information on the SEED worldwide Engineering mentoring program is
available at
http://research.sun.com/SEED/

We are in the mentor matching cycle for the 52 PreSEED participants.
I sent out the first mentor request emails on 5 May and I have 23
match confirmations so far this morning (44% done in the first 8 days).
Last week was the 2nd

OpenSolaris Developer Summit on the University of California at Santa
Cruz campus, plus the
CommunityOne event and
JavaOne at The Moscone Center in San Francisco, so many potential mentors
were too busy to reply. However, there has been a good response since then.

When the SEED program first started in 2001, it was limited to Sun Engineering
staff working in the USA. Since then, the scope of the mentoring program has
broadened. The current group of PreSEED mentors includes senior staff from: Bangalore, India; Dublin, Ireland; Grenoble, France; and Prague, Czech Republic;
as well as those based in the USA.

More information on the SEED worldwide Engineering mentoring program is
available at
http://research.sun.com/SEED/

We are in the mentor matching cycle for the 52 PreSEED participants.
I sent out the first mentor request emails on 5 May and I have 15
match confirmations so far. I just sent out the “Last Chance” emails
to those who have not yet responded to my first email. I also have
about ten potential mentors who are actively in the process of deciding
whether to accept the participant who requested them.

In addition to matching the PreSEED-2 term with mentors, Tanya Jankot and
I have been redesigning SEED in preparation of the 2008-2009 terms which
will open for applications on 21 May. Since the two PreSEED pilots have been
successful so far, we integrated PreSEED as the third of now three mentoring
groups offered by our program:

• Recent Hires (including newly acquired staff and recent college hires)
  
  This group provides promising recent Engineering hires and newly acquired
  staff with enriching and broadening experiences for their early years as Sun
  employees that make them more valuable to Sun and more satisfied with their careers
  at Sun.
  
• Established Staff
  
  This group provides Mentors to help develop, enrich, and broaden the experience
  and understanding of Sun Engineering staff who have been with the company for
  some time.
  
• PreSEED
  
  PreSEED is a new mentoring group aimed at helping Sun Engineering staff who
  have been getting almost all “Sun Standard” annual performance ratings onto a
  path which may lead them to higher engagement. One way to think of PreSEED
  is as a preliminary to the SEED Engineering mentoring program
  .

I sent email yesterday to the many thousands of Sun Engineering staff around the
world telling them that the 2008-2009 Recent Hire and Established Staff terms
are coming up. I also asked them to talk with their managers to see if
SEED is a good opportunity for them.

More information on the SEED worldwide Engineering mentoring program is available at

http://research.sun.com/SEED/

The 52 PreSEED participants submitted their Mentor Wish Lists this morning,
starting the mentor matching cycle for this term. Tanya Jankot spent
the morning updating participants’ web pages and learning goals from emails
over the weekend. Once we were set to go, she and I went through the
lists to find the highest priority potentially-available mentor. (Among this PreSEED
term’s lists, there were 9 potential mentors who had more than one request for them
at #1 priority. There were 36 potential mentors requested by five or more participants.
191 unique mentors were requested.)

I just finished sending individual emails to all 52 first contact potential mentors.
Now we wait for their responses… During the next two weeks, I expect to have a
mentor match for at least 80% of the participants. I plan to match all of them within
the next 45 days.

For the flow charts of this process, see

“SEED: Sun engineering enrichment & development”
Research Disclosure Database Number 482013, defensive publication
in Research Disclosure, Published in June 2004, Electronic
Publication Date : 17 May 2004 (5 pages, PDF format)

PreSEED is a pilot of the SEED worldwide Engineering mentoring program.
More information on SEED is available at

http://research.sun.com/SEED/