Category Archives: Mentoring & Other Business

We received 102 applications by last Friday’s deadline for Sun’s worldwide Engineering mentoring program, SEED. The SEED Established Staff term will run 15 January – 15 June 2007. All application materials were due 24 November 2006.

79 applications were complete. Tanya Jankot and I spent today checking, sorting, and
making updates based on emails. 25 applicants were disqualified for being too junior or
for not turning in their materials on time. I have sent many emails today returning
late applications, recommendations, and resumes and discouraging further submissions
since we do not accept materials after the deadline.

The selection decisions will be announced tomorrow afternoon. We expect to pick about
40 Established Staff term participants. I have been reading application forms and
letters since Friday. It will be very hard to pick from such an
impressively qualified group.

We have received 79 applications so far to Sun’s worldwide Engineering mentoring
program, SEED. The SEED Established Staff term will run 15 January-16 June 2007.
All application materials are due this Friday, 24 November 2006.

38 of the 79 applications have been completed but 13 others have already been disqualified.
I have sent email to all 13 and to their managers. All were disqualified for being too
junior for an Established Staff term, which requires among other criteria that participants
be at Principal level (Sun U.S. grade 9 equivalent) or above.

I held the last two phone-in presentation-and-question sessions yesterday and today.
Usually, the majority of applications come in during the last three days. We are getting
a good number of applications from outside of the western USA (where Sun headquarters is):

• Central USA: 11 [ 14% ]
• China: 11 [ 14% ]
• Czech Republic: 3 [ 4% ]
• EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa): 4 [ 5% ]
• Eastern USA: 6 [ 8% ]
• India: 2 [ 3% ]
• Ireland: 1 [ 1% ]
• Russia: 2 [ 3% ]
• United Kingdom: 3 [ 4% ]
• Western USA: 35 [ 44% ]
• no response: 1 [ 2% ]

On 28 November, we will pick up to 40 participants to form SEED’s
Established Staff term. The selection announcement will go to all applicants
and their managers that same day.

We have received 61 applications so far to Sun’s worldwide Engineering mentoring program, SEED. The SEED Established Staff term will run 15 January-16 June 2007. All application materials are due this Friday, 24 November 2006.

21 of the 61 applications have been completed but 8 others have already been disqualified. All were disqualified for being too junior for an Established Staff term, which requires among other criteria that participants be at Principal level (Sun U.S. grade 9 equivalent) or above.

I am holding two more phone-in presentation-and-question sessions this week: today
at 5 p.m. (in about 40 minutes) and tomorrow at 8 a.m., Pacific time. Usually,
the majority of applications come in during the last three days. We are getting
a good number of applications from outside of the western USA:

• Central USA: 10 [ 16% ]
• China: 5 [ 8% ]
• Czech Republic: 2 [ 3% ]
• EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa): 2 [ 3% ]
• Eastern USA: 5 [ 8% ]
• India: 2 [ 3% ]
• Ireland: 1 [ 2% ]
• Russia: 1 [ 2% ]
• United Kingdom: 3 [ 5% ]
• Western USA: 29 [ 48% ]
• no response: 1 [ 2% ]

On 28 November, we will pick up to 40 participants to form SEED’s
Established Staff term. The selection announcement will go to all applicants
and their managers that same day.

We have received 40 applications so far to Sun’s worldwide Engineering mentoring program, SEED. The SEED Established Staff term will run 15 January-16 June 2007.
All application materials are due this Friday, 24 November 2006.

12 of the 40 applications have been completed but 4 others have already been disqualified. All four were disqualified for being too junior for an Established Staff term, which requires among other criteria that participants be at Principal level (Sun U.S. grade 9 equivalent) or above.

I am holding two more phone-in presentation-and-question sessions this week: tomorrow at
5 p.m. and Wednesday at 8 a.m., Pacific time. Usually, the majority of applications come
in during the last three days. We are getting more applications from outside of the
western USA:

• Central USA: 7 [ 18% ]
• China: 2 [ 5% ]
• Czech Republic: 1 [ 2% ]
• EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa): 1 [ 2% ]
• Eastern USA: 3 [ 8% ]
• India: 2 [ 5% ]
• Russia: 1 [ 2% ]
• United Kingdom: 3 [ 8% ]
• Western USA: 19 [ 48% ]
• no response: 1 [ 2% ]

About a third of the applicants have applied to a prior SEED term as well. Tanya
Jankot is on vacation this week but we set everything up so that I can manage by
myself.

An article was just published called

“Mentors can help women shatter glass ceiling” By Eve Tahmincioglu,
MSNBC.com contributor (Nov 19, 2006). The article is interesting (and I am quoted
in it about Sun’s mentoring program!).

We have received 23 applications so far to Sun’s worldwide Engineering mentoring
program, SEED. The SEED Established Staff term will run 15 January-16 June
2007. All application materials are due 24 November 2006.

5 of the 23 applications have been completed but 3 others have been disqualified. All
three were disqualified for being too junior for an Established Staff term, which
requires among other criteria that participants be at Principal level (Sun U.S.
grade 9 equivalent) or above.

In addition to Sun CTO

Greg Papadopoulos sending email to Sun Engineering worldwide announcing this
SEED term, I have also
sent emails to a variety of subgroups, including GENO (Sun’s Global Engineering Org.),
and Sun’s “Employee Resource Groups”. ERG used to be called affinity groups or
diversity groups, all of which is HR talk for “a network of Sun employees who
share a common identity, characteristic, or set of interests”.

A book from which I have learned a great deal is Unlocking the Clubhouse,
Women in Computing by Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher. In addition to
reading the book and keeping it handy for reference, I have been honored to talk
with each of the authors several different times. Dr. Allan Fisher is the former
Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education at Carnegie Mellon and is now the
President, CEO, and co-Founder of iCarnegie.
Dr. Jane Margolis is a social scientist now with the

UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies.

In Unlocking the Clubhouse (ISBN: 0262632691, published in 2001),
I have found a number of specific and helpful suggestions. The book is
focussed on women in computing but the suggestions seem to work well for a wide
variety of groups. The passage I have read most recently is on p.115 (Chapter
7: A Tale of 240 Teachers):

Recruiting Girls

Rule number one, then, is that teachers have to deliberately focus
effort on recruiting girls. If teachers issue a generic recruitment call,
boys turn out. Girls must know that the teacher is talking to them. Sometimes
all it takes is a few minutes of encouragement to fire a girl’s interest and
to give her confidence to take a class.

…Girls do not want to be the only one in the class, so two mottoes emerged:
“Recruit friendship circles” and “Recruit a posse”.

Both of these suggestions (sending targeted invitations rather than only generic
recruitment calls, and also recruiting groups who can then support each other) have
worked very well in the SEED program. Since 2004, SEED has held a number of
“pilot” terms focussed on target groups in Engineering.
Most of those pilots were for staff in a particular geographic area (India,
China, Czech Rep., France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, and Russia) but we also
recently had a pilot SEED term for stars and rising stars among the Engineering
staff Sun acquired with StorageTek.

Holding pilot terms helps to build interest for later regular worldwide SEED terms
also. So far in this SEED application period, we have applications from:

• Central USA: 2 [ 9% ]
• China: 1 [ 4% ]
• Czech Republic: 1 [ 4% ]
• EMEA: 1 [ 4% ]
• Eastern USA: 3 [ 13% ]
• Russia: 1 [ 4% ]
• United Kingdom: 1 [ 4% ]
• Western USA: 12 [ 52% ]
• no response: 1 [ 4% ]

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.