Category Archives: Mentoring & Other Business

Congratulations and welcome to the 68 mentoring pairs in the
SEED Engineering mentoring program 2007-2008 terms! Here are
some 2007-2008 Metrics:

• SEED Alumni

  10 mentors this term have also been SEED program participants

• Executives

  • Recent Hire Mentors include:
    • 1 Fellow/Vice President
    • 4 VPs
    • 5 Distinguished Engineers
    • 4 Directors
    • 58% executives overall
  • Established Staff Mentors include:
    • 1 Fellow/Vice President
    • 7 VPs
    • 15 Distinguished Engineers
    • 11 Directors
    • 77% executives overall

• Mentor Experience with SEED

  • 21 Mentors are serving for the 1st time with SEED (31%)
  • 19 Mentors are in their 2nd SEED term (28%)
  • 16 Star Mentors are in their 3rd or 4th term (24%)
  • 13 Superstar Mentors are in their 5th to 10th SEED term (19%)

• Location

  • 41 mentoring pairs are working at a distance – in different
    states or countries (60%)
  • 27 work in the same area or the same town (40%)

• Priority

  • 88% of participants (59 count) were matched with one of their
    top four priority choices on their Mentor Wish List:
    
    50 with #1 or #2
    
    
    9 with #3 or #4
    
    
    9 with someone at #5 or lower in priority
    
  • 6 participants had to prepare more than one Mentor Wish List
    this term. 5 of those were because the 1st list was incomplete.

• Cycle Time

  • 1st email invitations went to potential mentors on 9 July 2007.
  • Last match was confirmed in email on 23 August 2007.
  • This was a 47 day matching cycle.

More information on SEED is available at
http://research.sun.com/SEED/

The 2007-2008 SEED Engineering mentoring terms are now 93% matched with
64 participants and mentors paired. We also have confirmations for all
presenters for the SEED annual in-person event next month, including the SEED Showcase presenters (2 from India, 1 from Canada, 1 from
the Czech Republic, 2 from China, and 2 from the USA). SEED Showcase
presenters give brief talks on their current work. I have already
distributed the CTO’s travel scholarships to help 17 SEED
participants attend the meeting. Executives speaking to the SEEDs
will include:

• 
  Dr. Greg Papadopoulos, Chief Technology Officer and Executive
  Vice President of Research and Development
  
  SEED program executive sponsor
  
• 
  Dr. Whitfield Diffie, VP, Fellow, Chief Security Officer
  
  4 time SEED Mentor
  
• Mike Splain, Senior Vice President, Sun Fellow,
  Chief Engineer
  
  4 time SEED Mentor
  
• 
  Dr. Sheueling Chang-Shantz, Distinguished Engineer,
  Sun Microsystems Laboratories
  
  7 time SEED Mentor
  

More information on SEED is available at
http://research.sun.com/SEED/

The 2007-2008 SEED Engineering mentoring terms are now 77% matched with
53 participants and mentors paired. The mentors for the Recent Hire and
Established Staff participants so far include 12 Vice Presidents (2 of them
Fellows), and 26 Directors (half of them Distinguished Engineers). That is,
72% of the matched mentors so far are senior executives.

More information on SEED is available at
http://research.sun.com/SEED/

The SEED Engineering mentoring program is in the matching cycle for its
Recent Hires and Established Staff participants in the 2007-2008 worldwide
terms. We have 41 mentoring pairs confirmed so far. That is, in the
first ten days of the cycle, we have 60% of our participants matched.
Most of the mentors so far have been SEED mentors before. Seven mentors are
SEED alumni, meaning that they were participants themselves in earlier terms.

Several of the mentors have position titles in addition to their
official ones. This term, SEED is honored and delighted to welcome
as mentors the Eco Responsibility Executive, the Chief Privacy Officer, Chief
Security Officer, and the Chief Gaming Officer among staff with the more usual
titles of Vice President, Fellow, Distinguished Engineer, and Director.

More information on SEED is available at
http://research.sun.com/SEED/

The SEED Engineering mentoring program is in the matching cycle for its
70 participants (Recent Hires and Established Staff) in the 2007-2008 worldwide
terms. Mentor Wish Lists (15 prioritized potential mentor names with
detailed reasons for preference) were due at 9 a.m. yesterday. Yesterday
and today, I sent out the first 70 personalized email invitations, each going to the
highest priority eligible mentor from the participant’s Mentor Wish List.
So far, 13 mentors have accepted the proposed match. It will take
one to two months to match everyone but this is a good start.

There were almost 300 unique potential mentors requested on this term’s Mentor Wish
Lists. 7 of those had multiple 1st Priority requests. About 60 potential mentors were requested by 5 or more mentees. The potential mentor with the most individual requests
received 23. Deciding between duplicate requests is tricky. If a mentor is requested
at the same priority level by more than one person, the more senior requestor
gets preference. (We had one Distinguished Engineer requested at Priority #1
by three Senior Staff Engineers plus a Staff Engineer. It was a hard choice.) If
the requestors have the same seniority, we compare their reasons for wanting that mentor.

This term, Tanya Jankot added error checking to the Mentor Wish
List web form, so we had many fewer participants requesting
unavailable potential mentors. This means that fewer top slots were
wasted and I was able to invite 56 potential mentors from the #1
priority slot. Happily, we got only two requests on this term’s Mentor Wish Lists for
people who no longer work for Sun.

More information on SEED is available at
http://research.sun.com/SEED/

9 of the 70 new SEED Engineering mentoring program participants have
already sent in their Mentor Wish Lists. These mentor request lists
are all due on 9 July. At the same time, the participants are reviewing
their new personal (internal to Sun) web pages. These web pages can
be customized at the participant’s request but at a minimum contain
their name, title, location, and resume. The potential mentors review
the web page information when deciding whether to accept a proposed
mentee.

Two participants who entered the program already matched with their
mentors; they only need to submit a Mentor Wish List with the single name
of their already-matched mentor. Everyone else is working toward the
9 July deadline for creating their 15 name list. SEED provides a great
deal of background information on over 300 potential mentors; none the less,
creating a Mentor Wish list is time consuming and hard work.

The SEED Engineering mentoring program takes a long-term view and does not have
a preference for one kind of learning over another. That is, the mentoring partnership learning does not have to have anything to do with the participant’s current job. Some people want to learn to be better technical managers, others want to know how to get their ideas to customers faster. Many want to improve their soft skills: public presentation or speaking, negotiating, conflict management, and coaching. Still others want to improve their work and family balance and still have a great career. It takes time and mature consideration to work through all of this. Creating the Mentor Wish List is probably the hardest part of the SEED program.

It may take several days to prepare a list and reasons for preference that represent
the participant’s interests well. In creating their Mentor Wish List, each
SEED participant needs to make two difficult decisions:

1. What they want to learn
2. Who has already accomplished the kind of things they want to do
   (that is, who is already down the path that they see themselves
   walking)

One of the SEED alumni once described his experience in composing his
wish list as being like writing love letters to 15 different women.

More information on SEED is available at
http://research.sun.com/SEED/

On Wednesday, the SEED Engineering mentoring program Selection Committees
picked 69 new participants:

• 25 September 2007-September 2008 Recent Hires (12 month term)
• 44 September 2007-March 2008 Established Staff (6 month term)

The participants are putting together their Mentor Wish Lists now; those are due on
9 July. This group was unusual in several ways: fewer applicants, lower
percentage of managers and women, broader geographic spread. SEED has its
first participants working in Chile, Brazil, and Turkey this term.
We are looking into why there are these differences. Here is some information
about our new folks:

19% of those selected had previously applied to the program.

About the 25 new Recent Hire Participants:

59 Recent Hire Applications
43 Completed Applications (73%)
25 Selected (58% of completed, 42% of total)
Location of Participants
1 Canada, 4%
3 China, 12%
2 Czech Republic, 8%
5 India, 20%
1 Russia, 4%
13 USA, 52%
3 Central USA, 12%
1 Eastern USA,  4%
9 Western USA, 36%
Division of Participants
1 CTO/Sun Labs, 4%
3 Microelectronics, 12%
1 Sales, 4%
11 Software Group, 44%
3 Storage Group, 12%
5 Systems Group, 20%
1 Worldwide Operations, 4%
Gender of Participants
5 Female, 20%
20 Male, 80%
1 Manager, 4%

About the 44 new Established Staff Participants:

109 Applications
88 Completed (81%)
44 Selected (50% of completed, 40% of total)
Location of Participants
1 Brazil, 2%
2 China, 5%
1 Chile, 2%
1 Czech Republic, 2%
2 Germany, 5%
2 India, 5%
2 Ireland, 5%
1 Russia, 2%
1 Turkey, 2%
31 USA, 70%
6 Central USA, 14%
6 Eastern USA, 14%
19 Western USA, 43%
Division of Participants
1 CTO/Sun Labs, 2%
2 Microelectronics, 5%
3 Sales, 7%
5 Services, 11%
21 Software Group, 48%
2 Storage Group, 5%
9 Systems Group, 20%
1 Worldwide Operations, 2%
Gender of Participants
6 Female, 14%
38 Male, 86%
4 Managers, 9%

Tanya and I think we exchanged about 1,500 emails during the last week
with program applicants and their managers. Good to be on to the next
phase…