Category Archives: Mentoring & Other Business

This morning the last two participants in our SEED Engineering mentoring
term for Israel and Russia were matched. This term had one of the shortest
cycle times ever for mentor matching: just 3 weeks to match 33 participants.
70% of the mentors are
executives: 6 Vice Presidents (including one VP/Fellow, one VP/DE,
and one Executive VP), and 17 Directors (including 5 DEs – Distinguished
Engineers).

SEED held a call in world-wide meeting on Wednesday and it was a delight to
hear the voices from St. Petersburg, Herzliya, Prague, Hamburg, Dublin,
Bangalore, two locations in France, and all over the USA. The talks by
Sun CTO
Greg Papadopoulos and Sun Fellow Bob Sproull
were excellent. Some of Greg’s content can be seen in the eWeek article

“Sun CTO: Open Services the Next Big Thing”.

SEED is in its first week of the application period for the term
to benefit legacy StorageTek staff. There are 11 applications so far.
We held our first call-in overview-and-question meeting on Thursday.
There is another scheduled for next week. We have set the date for
the Selection Committee to meet. All application materials are due
on 24 March. The selection announcement will be made on 30 March.

We have now matched 30 out of the 33 participants from Tel Aviv and
St. Petersburg. The remaining 3 are actively being considered
by potential mentors.

Our MidTerm event is tomorrow with
talks by Sun CTO
Greg Papadopoulos and Sun Fellow Bob Sproull.
Greg is SEED’s executive sponsor and Bob has served as a SEED mentor
more often than anyone else. This event is called “mid-term” because
the SEED year runs September to September (for the convenience of
new college grads joining SEED’s Recent Hire program).

We have also just announced and opened the application period for a
pilot mentoring term to benefit Engineering staff who came to Sun through StorageTek. Pilot SEED terms have somewhat different criteria and rules from
the program as a whole. SEED has run 4 location-specific pilots in the last few
years, but this will be our first professional-area-specific term.
It will be interesting to see what differences that mix of participants
makes, if any.

I just sent in our monthly report and realized that, counting the
pilot just announced, SEED is running 5 terms at the same time.

19 days after starting the mentor matching process for the St.Petersburg and Tel Aviv SEED term, we have matched 27 of the 33 participants.
This term got off to a little slower start than the first term from
EMEA (for staff in Dublin, Grenoble, Hamburg, and Prague) but at the two
week mark, both terms were at about 2/3 matched. This EMEA-2 group already
has 5 Vice Presidents and 5 Distinguished Engineers among its mentor group
so they are getting some very serious executive support. Unusually,
only 8 of the matched mentors have served the program before; the rest are
mentoring with SEED for the first time. Also unusual is that we may get
through this entire matching process on one Mentor Wish List from everybody.
That is: all but one of the six participants not yet matched is being
considered by a potential prioritized among their top five.

All in all, I have good hopes of getting everyone matched well within the
first month.

Yesterday, Tanya Jankot and I put together our working contact list from
the 33 prioritized Mentor Wish Lists which came in earlier this week
from the new SEED participants in Tel Aviv and St. Petersburg.
Once all the lists were in, my first task was to call potential mentors
who were asked for at a highest priority level by more than one person to
find out if they had a preference. One of those mentors took both
participants who asked for her, two others took one each, the last
was not available.
If I was not able to reach a particularly popular mentor, we went with the
most senior of the requestors. This term, although there were more than ten
potential mentors for whom there were five to a dozen requests, we only
had four with two highest priority requests each. It gets really tricky
when we have three or four top requests for the same person.

Once the top priority conflicts were sorted out, Tanya and I started at the end
of the alphabet by surname (last term we started at the beginning of
the alphabet) to see which was the highest priority mentor on each list
who was not known to be unavailable. This required:

• Removing names of a few requested Mentors who already indicated
  privately that they are unavailable to act as a Mentor.

• Removing the names of Mentors who were matched with a Participant before the program started (none this term) or who are still working with a SEED
  participant from a prior term (lots of those this term).

• Removing names of requested Mentors who do not meet the minimum
  seniority requirement (only one this term).

When all that was done, we had created the working contact list.
Then, I sent out my first 33 emails. Contacting potential SEED mentors
is a serial process.
That is, I contact one potential mentor from each Wish List at a time and
each has up to a week to respond. I do not contact all of the potential
mentors for a participant in parallel.

So far, I have 5 confirmed matches (3 yesterday afternoon
and evening, and 2 this morning), and a half dozen additional expressions of
interest. I estimate this whole process will take about 6 weeks.

Tanya Jankot and I have started work on our next SEED pilot term.
The mentor matching
for the last three terms has gone very quickly so we are going to see
if it is possible to run five terms starting in 2006:

1. January-June: Dublin, Grenoble, Hamburg, Prague participants
2. March-September: St. Petersburg and Tel Aviv participants
3. June-December: pilot term now in development (not yet announced)
4. September 2006-September 2007: Recent Hire (regular world-wide term)*
5. September 2006-March 2007: Established Staff (regular world-wide term)*

* to be announced in May 2006

I am putting together the Selection Commitee now. I have talked with the
excutives of the target group and drafted the term’s web page. Each pilot
term has its own web page to address its particularities. Each such
page has a “Reference” section with excellent advice from amazingly successful
and interesting people in science and technology. Some of my favorites:

• “Engineering a solution: Bring women into the fold” by Carol Bartz, CEO
  of Autodesk and former Sun executive, The Mercury News, San Jose,
  California, 24 March 2005

• The Mythical Man-Month / Essays on Software Engineering by Frederick
  P. Brooks, 1995, Addison Wesley Longman; ISBN: 0201835959

• 
  “Things I Wish I Learned in Engineering School” by Rick Cattell, Sun
  Distinguished Engineer (article by Janice J. Heiss, 22 October 2004)
  
  
  Rick’s book web site

• Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing by Jane Margolis, Allan
  Fisher (former Dean of Undergraduate Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon Univ.),
  The MIT Press; 2003, ISBN: 0262632691

• “The Citizen Engineer”, Sun CTO Greg Papadopoulos delivered this commencement address to graduates of the University of California, Irvine, School of Engineering, on June 18, 2005.
• Alternative Careers in Science: Leaving the Ivory Tower (Scientific Survival Skills) by Cynthia Robbins-Roth, Academic Press, 2005, ISBN: 0125893760
• “The Unwritten Laws Of Engineering: Revised and Updated” (2001) Edited by: James G. Skakoon and W.J. King (ASME)
  
  Available through:
  http://www.asme.org/catalog/

• 
  “Technology and Courage” by Ivan Sutherland, Sun Fellow, Perspectives-96-1
  (April 1996), Sun Labs (33 pages, PDF)

• Edward Tufte
  (Professor Emeritus at Yale University) on information design

The
Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing is always an
inspiring and exciting event. The 4-7 October 2006 Hopper conference
in San Diego is of particular interest because this is the first time since
1997 it has been held on the West Coast of the USA. Several of
us at Sun are preparing panel and presentation proposals, due on
15 March. I had fun setting up the “Mentoring and Leadership Grooming:
Technical Women in Industry” panel on mentoring for GHC 2004
and I hope to get a new panel proposal accepted for this year too.

Sun is a Partner of the
Anita Borg Institute which runs the Hopper conference.

Yesterday, we selected 33 new SEED Engineering mentoring program
participants from Israel and Russia. The selection was difficult
because this was a very accomplished and highly recommended
group. We ended up picking 11 from Tel Aviv (Herzliya) and
22 From St. Petersburg from among the 45 applicants. As usual,
about a quarter of the participants are women. Unusually,
all of this group works in Sun’s Software Group.

Since the selection meeting, Tanya Jankot and I have been very busy indeed.
We have sent out announcements, started the Mentor Wish List building
process, set up email lists, and done all of the electronic and
management chores that go along with setting up a new SEED term.
I have also been communicating with disappointed managers of staff
who were not selected.

Today, Tanya created an internal individual web page for each
participant to help show them off to potential mentors. The
participants will now have until 22 February to personalize those
web pages and send us their Mentor Wish Lists.