Tag Archives: Sun Labs

July 13, 2009 · 10:21 am

Mentoring in Engineering and Computer Science

Work to balance the diversity of Participants in terms of demographics, professional area, and geographic location.

The context of the Engineering community is key here. It bounds the SEED program and defines its organizational character. Compare this to the Mentoring@Sun program, started in 1992 as a general Sun-wide mentoring program. The SEED program was developed by Sun in 2001 to address Engineering organization needs that were not met by Mentoring@Sun. That is, SEED is an internal mentoring and leadership growth program designed to meet the needs of a key professional area, running in parallel with a more general internal program.

  • Both SEED and Mentoring@Sun are very effective at making connections between organizational silos, what Helen calls cross-pollinating.
    For more on this, read my blog entry Internal or External Mentoring Program? (30 June 2009).Scope:
    SEED mentors can be from any part of Sun so long as they are at principal-level or above in seniority. SEED mentees, however, must all be working in Engineering, which is defined as:

    “Hardware and software engineering positions where the primary job purpose is to perform engineering research, design, and development activities resulting in innovative Sun products for external customers. Also included are staff positions providing strategic support to engineering research, design, and development activities.”

    Again, the Engineering professional context provides specific program boundaries: only these positions are included, others are not. (This would sound like inappropriate exclusivity if Engineering did not make up about half of Sun’s employees.)

    Training Focus:
    Each mentoring program should provide training that helps the pairs feel comfortable from the start and work well together for the entire term. Training is particularly important in special cases, such as when mentor and mentee work in different professional areas (Microelectronics and Finance, for example), have a wide gap in their relative experience or seniority (such as a Senior Director mentoring a recent college hire Member of the Technical Staff), are working at a distance (for over half of SEED mentoring pairs, the mentor and mentee work in different cities, states, or countries), or come from very different cultures.SEED offers two hours of individual training by phone for each mentoring pair. Using a standard set of materials (Helen and I update these annually), pair training is tailored to their strengths and challenge areas. The geek personality is common enough that our mentoring training materials have a special section for Engineering. Engineers are professional problem solvers who are usually very smart analytical logical thinkers. Sometimes it can be a stretch for them to see the other person’s point of view. Many of them do not suffer fools. Mentoring training for extreme geeks may focus on teaching how to disagree agreeably (using tactful phrases) and learning when problem solving may not be what is needed or wanted by their mentoring partner.

    Management Style:
    Managing an Engineering mentoring program requires communicating well and maintaining trust with Engineers. SEED is a prestigious leadership grooming program, so the decision of which applicants get accepted can be controversial. The selection system must be fair and seen to be fair. Selection criteria for SEED are based on the values of the Engineering community (such as: demonstrated technical excellence, creativity, leadership, holding patents, publishing papers, earning an excellent letter of recommendation by an executive, etc.) Many of SEED’s selection criteria are also reflected in job promotion criteria for Engineering staff. Sun Engineering has an egalitarian open door culture which values data-driven decisions and a transparent management style. While respecting confidentiality, SEED routinely makes a great deal of program information available to Sun Engineering. SEED program participants regularly contribute suggestions on how to improve the program and its web tools.

    What is the Geek Personality?

    A brief digression into the personal and social context of Engineers since this has such a strong influence on mentoring in Engineering…

    While Sun Engineering staff include a very broad range of personality types, there are some unusual concentrations. SEED mentoring training includes a section on Myers-Briggs style personality types. This provides a good context and vocabulary for mentoring pairs to discuss differences and commonalities and promote mutual understanding. (We skip this section of training for staff who think the use of personality types is Psychology black magic.) Sun used to offer personality assessments as part of its regular career coaching benefit. In 2002, I used a survey to collect information from 143 Sun Engineering staff about their formally assessed personality type. While not a statistically valid sample, it is nonetheless interesting:

  • 59% of the Sun Engineering staff reported that they had been assessed as I
    (introvert)About 50% of the US population are I (introvert)
  • 66% of the Sun Engineering staff reported that they were NT (intuitive thinkers)About 10% of the US population are NT (intuitive thinkers)

(Yes, this does mean that Engineers are abnormal, statistically at least).

Introverts have been defined as “people who find other people tiring” (see “Caring for Your Introvert” by Jonathan Rauch, The Atlantic, March 2003). A t-shirt popular with Engineers says “You read my t-shirt. That’s enough social interaction for one day.” (see Think Geek T-shirt). SEED works hard to make its communications comfortable for an introverted group. For example, we lay out the expected interactions and always allow the participants to engage at their own comfort level. One analysis of downside to being an introvert is that:

      “In our extrovertist society, being outgoing is considered normal and therefore desirable, a mark of happiness, confidence, leadership. Extroverts are seen as bighearted, vibrant, warm, empathic. ‘People person’ is a compliment. Introverts are described with words like ‘guarded,’ ‘loner,’ ‘reserved,’ ‘taciturn,’ ‘self-contained, private’ – narrow, ungenerous words, words that suggest emotional parsimony and smallness of personality. Female introverts, I suspect, must suffer especially. In certain circles, particularly in the Midwest, a man can still sometimes get away with being what they used to call a strong and silent type; introverted women, lacking that alternative, are even more

 

    likely than men to be perceived as timid, withdrawn, haughty.”(Ibid, 2003 article by Jonathan Rauch)

For more on Social Context, Gender, and Mentoring, see my blog entry Picking Your Mentor, Picking Your Mentee.

Finding Mentors for Engineering

Since 2001, I have matched almost 1,200 mentoring pairs; 70% of the mentors were executives (Directors, Vice Presidents, Principal Engineers, Fellows, etc.). SEED gets an average of 90% participant satisfaction rating on its quarterly reports, year after year. What do these executive mentors look for in mentees? Why do so many find SEED to be such a satisfying program? Most of the questions mentors ask when I contact them about working with a potential mentee are structural: availability, time commitment required to participate, potential areas of difficulty (like being in the same management chain or speaking different primary languages), and physical or time zone proximity are common questions. Along with those are asked more substantive questions about intellectual common ground, interests, and personal compatibility. Somewhere in this mix, almost all potential mentors ask something like “Why me? What does this person want to know that I am uniquely able to teach?” (For more on mentor questions and preferences, read my 6 July 2009 blog entry Picking Your Mentor, Picking Your Mentee).

Notice that relatively few questions are about the topic or professional area to be discussed. SEED Mentors have served from all areas of Engineering worldwide, plus Operations, Sales, Service, Legal, Information Technology, Finance, Human Resources, and Marketing. Most of the non-Engineering staff were recruited as SEED mentors at the specific request of a mentee who asked to learn from them. I originally recruited the General Counsel as a mentor because a Software Engineer wanted to learn more from the lawyer’s success as a business leader. (He enjoyed the experience and has served as a mentor five times since.) I recruited a Finance Vice President because a Systems Program Manager wanted a mentor who really understood financial planning, revenue and cost management. Sun Microsystems is an Engineering-driven company, so most non-Engineering staff are eager to help (as well as extend their own connections in Engineering).

I have observed that the more experienced or senior a mentor is, the more willing they are to discuss a very broad range of topics. It is usually the more junior mentors who question their breadth of ability or the value of their experience outside of their immediate area of professional expertise. The mentors who seem to get the most out of their SEED experience are the executives. One Software Vice President told me that his hour with his mentee was his vacation, the only time all week when he knew the answers. A different Software Vice President told Helen that he always looked forward to meeting with his mentee: it was his only non-confrontational meeting. This positive experience is reflected in SEED’s metrics for repeat mentor participation:

  • 48% of the total 460+ potential mentors on SEED’s current list have been mentors more than once. This includes principal-level senior staff
    plus executives.(This does not count their service in Mentoring@Sun or other Sun mentoring programs.)
  • 65% of those repeat mentors are executives.
  • 54% of all of the executives who have ever been SEED mentors have mentored more than once.45 executives have have served as a SEED mentor five or more times.4 Sun executives have mentored ten or more times with SEED.

A Marketing Vice President wrote in evaluation of his sixth SEED mentoring experience:

“This continues to be a great program and I get a lot out of it — possibly more than the mentees.”

Series

Information is from my experience since 2001 managing Sun’s SEED Engineering-wide world-wide mentoring program, and from the Mentoring@Sun general mentoring program, and the mentoring program for new Sun Vice Presidents managed by Helen Gracon since 1996. Helen Gracon also provides training for SEED. This is part of a continuing series on mentoring programs. Other entries in this series:

For more about SEED, see the program home page at http://research.sun.com/SEED.

By Katy Dickinson
Director, Business Process Architecture
Chief Technologist’s Office & Sun Labs, Sun Microsystems

1 Comment

Filed under Mentoring & Other Business

Tagged as , , ,

July 11, 2009 · 7:31 pm

Mentoring Program Web Tools and Process

Web tool design is a technical art which requires an unusual combination of software programming, usability engineering, and program management skills. As Director of Sun Microsystems’ SEED Engineering-wide worldwide mentoring program since 2001 (and the program’s Process Architect), I have been gifted with two talented staff members who can do this work. Tanya Jankot has been SEED’s Applications Engineer since 2003. Before Tanya  Justin Yang held the position of SEED Program Manager for two years.

SEED developed its own set of tools for mentoring program and information management. These tools have not been “productized”. Why not use an external-to-Sun set of web tools? For the answer, read my 30 June 2009 blog Internal or External Mentoring Program?

Tools and Process Overview

The original SEED program was based on a year-long need analysis and program design in 2000 by a team mostly made up of Sun Human Resources (HR) and Engineering staff. The process itself was created on-the-fly during the first pilot term in 2001. The SEED mentoring program has expanded to a much larger audience in recent years and SEED’s web tools have developed and been redesigned accordingly. In the program’s first year, 2001-2002, there was just one term. In 2008-2009, there have been 12 overlapping terms in four groups (Recent Hires, Established Staff, PreSEED, and special pilots). Since the SEED team and I were creating a new mentoring system essentially from scratch in the 2001 pilot term, our guidelines for process and tool development were:

  1. Keep it simple
  2. Check in with customers and stakeholders frequently
  3. Only include the minimum: question the need for each step before it goes in, and again at every review, and again before publication
  4. Let the process define the web tools
  5. Assume that process and tool users will have access to only the most basic web resources and performance
  6. Collect and analyze data routinely and make decisions based on those data

These guidelines have continued to serve SEED well. We also kept using the concept of a “pilot” to expand the program. In pilot terms, the rules, process, and/or scope are somewhat different from the regular SEED program. The Established Staff group was created in 2002 and the PreSEED program was created in 2008 using pilot programs; both have been very popular offerings. A pilot allows us to put something imperfect out there to see
what works. Sometimes pilots fail (for example, the SEED-2 or SEED Alumni term in 2007 only attracted ten participants).

SEED now has two major formal processes, for participant selection, and for mentor selection. These processes are published in full detail for the use of Sun internal program participants. Flow charts are also available in the appendix of “Sun Mentoring: 1996-2009” the Sun Labs 2009 Technical Report  (includes a copy of the Research Disclosure Database Number 482013, defensive publication from Research Disclosure, Published in June 2004, Electronic Publication Date : 17 May 2004).

In November 2008, Tanya created and gave an internal-to-Sun presentation on developing simple web technologies using the SEED tools as examples. Her presentation was created to educate other Sun project teams and web teams. The information following about SEED web tools is derived from Tanya’s presentation. Her overview statements about the SEED’s current web tools:

  • The technology was built to model SEED mentoring processes which were already designed and pilot tested (we tried to fit the tools into the existing work flow rather than build processes around the tools).
  • The tools have evolved with the program: need for greater automation to allow scaling, new requirements as the program expanded across geographical areas regions, organizations, etc.
  • SEED relies on existing Sun corporate data systems as much as possible, only
    gathering additional information not already available elsewhere.

More specific details follow about SEED’s web tools and the technology and process behind them. Screen shots and other confidential data have been removed from Tanya’s original presentation material.

Developing Simple Web Technologies for the SEED Mentoring Program

Tools Behind the Program

  • The systems supporting the SEED program have evolved with it over time. They currently include:
    – A system to manage each term’s application process. Details are in Term Application Materials and Term Application Management, below.
    – A system to support the mentor matching process. Details are in Mentor Request Management, below.
    – An archive of program applicants, participants, mentors, etc. which enables long-term program management and metrics. Details are in
    SEED Program Database, below.
    – Applications to support regular program activities, such as regular quarterly feedback reports and bi-annual events for mentees, mentors, and the mentee’s managers.
  • Tool development goals:
    – Ensure the integrity and confidentiality of applicant and participant data.
    – Increase the ease-of-use for program participants and SEED staff.
    – Increase program efficiency and quality of data available to the SEED team, extend the number of participants, raise the value of participant experience, and justify their trust in the program

Simple Technologies

  • “SAMP” (Solaris, Apache, MySQL, and Perl & PHP)
  • htaccess and Sun confidential employee records access authentication
  • Queries to the Sun confidential employee records system
  • Email
  • Other technologies available within Sun and Sun Labs, such as a name auto-suggest widget and a survey tool.
  • And still making use of old-fashioned static web pages

Term Application Materials

  • SEED terms have an application period, usually lasting two to three weeks, with firm deadlines.
  • htaccess and Sun confidential employee records access are used for authentication
  • In addition to submitting a completed application form, applicants must also submit their resume, their manager must submit a letter of recommendation, and in some cases they must also secure additional letters of recommendation from Sun executives. All materials are submitted through web-based forms.
  • Design considerations
    – Applicants are located worldwide.
    — Application materials need to be as clear and simple as possible because for many employees, English is not their primary language.
    — Applications must be functional on all Sun systems and locations. This includes Sun hardware with Solaris software, Sun Ray systems, experimental systems, as well as a variety of Macs, laptops, and PCs.
    – Application materials must reflect Sun’s organizational structure and HR policies in an understandable way. Many applicants are new to Sun and are not familiar with its organization or policies.
    — Divisions, organizations
    — Job Codes, titles
    – Manager and executive recommendation letters are submitted confidentially but are a required part of an application. A secure mechanism is needed for applicants to view the status of their application but not the details of all materials.
    – In order to ensure that all materials are submitted correctly and not “lost” (i.e., a recommendation letter is submitted against an incorrect applicant SunID), Sun confidential employee records system lookup, email confirmations, and SQL audits of the database are used.
    – Each term’s application materials are stored in a separate database for easy management. Key applicant data that needs to be tracked long-term is loaded into the SEED archive database at the end of the application period.

Term Application Management (SEED Team Website)

  • A central website used by the SEED program staff to efficiently track the status of applicants and their materials.
  • At the end of the term application period, key applicant data is verified against Sun’s Human Resources records.
  • Used by SEED’s executive selection committee to review each applicant thoroughly.
  • Tool goals
    – Present useful summary data in a small amount of space.
    – Accurately reflect the status and materials received for each applicant.
    – Allow a complete review of each applicant’s submitted materials.
    – Make information easy to find to answer questions from applicants, participants, managers, and mentors quickly and accurately.
    – Print in a useable format.

Mentor Request Management

  • Upon acceptance to the program, all participants are required to submit a 10-name “Mentor Wish List” of mentors they would like to work with.
  • At the close of the mentor request period and receipt of all wish lists, the SEED program staff begins the mentor match process. For each participant, the goal is to match them with the highest priority eligible mentor from their Mentor Wish List.
  • A decision is made in each case where more than one Participant requests the same potential mentor. In SEED’s current terms, 80 mentees prepared 10-name lists, which resulted in 387 unique mentor requests. There were 10 potential mentors with multiple 1st Priority requests and 39 mentors who were requested by 5 or more mentees. This is a common problem: as many as twenty-two(!) potential mentees in one term have requested the same mentor. The primary basis for this decision is the priority order on the Mentor Wish List provided by the Participant. The Participant’s seniority (number of years at Sun) may be used as a tiebreaker, with the more senior Participant getting preference.
  • Tool Requirements
    – For each mentor requested, both name and SunID are required to be entered due to variations in name entry and frequent errors in entering SunIDs.
    – A name auto-suggest widget has been very useful in creating cleaner submissions.
    – The Mentor Request form includes a validation step in order to check for known conflicts in the SEED Potential Mentors list.

SEED Program Database

  • The SEED program database drives the long-term management of the program.
  • It allows us to track past applicants, participants, and mentors, as well as manage our list of 450+ Potential Mentors: mentors who have volunteered to work with program participants.
  • These records allow for regular metrics analysis of the program, currently done annually. Automated metrics tracking is a goal that is in progress.
  • Challenges
    – Maintaining the data so it is meaningful over time. For example, divisional organizational changes (reorg) make it difficult to summarize the number of participants we have had from each organization over the life of the program.
    – Keeping the mentor records up-to-date: removing broken links, updating titles in a timely way.
    – We need to maintain records of all program mentors, participants, and applicants, even after they have left Sun.

Conclusions

  • The systems and tools that support SEED have evolved with the program over time. They are not a single unified system, but being modular are easy to modify or extend when changes are required.
  • Using the technologies that are available and used by others allows you to be more efficient: learning from their work, and sharing components when possible.

Series

This is part of a continuing series on mentoring programs. Information is to answer frequently asked questions, based on my experience since 2001 managing Sun’s SEED Engineering-wide world-wide mentoring program. Other entries in this series were integrated into “Sun Mentoring: 1996-2009” the Sun Labs 2009 Technical Report.

25 October 2013 – links and text updated

Leave a comment

Filed under Mentoring & Other Business

Tagged as , , ,

October 9, 2006 · 12:18 pm

Wrapping up the Hopper Conference

More than 30 Sun women attended and worked at the Hopper conference in San Diego last week. Working at Sun’s recruiting table and at the Treasure Hunt table gave us opportunities not only to talk with potential new Sun staff but also to get to know each other better. I think I have seen two dozen enthusiastic emails just this morning from the Sun Engineers, executives, and managers who attended the Hopper conference and came home with a buzz.

Several names got inadvertently left off of the presenters’ list on Sun’s press release “Sun Microsystems’ Executives Among Leading Presenters at 2006 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing”. The whole list of Sun presenters was:

  • Katy Dickinson (Director, Business Process Architecture, CTO and Sun Labs) and Carol Gorski (Director, CTO and Sun Labs HR) 4 October: talk on mentoring at the TechLeaders Workshop on “5 Years of Mentoring by the Numbers”
  • Ingrid Van Den Hoogen (Sun Sr. Vice President, Brand, Global Communications and Integrated Marketing), and Emily Suter Ransford (Sun Business Development Manager, Marketing) 4 October: “It Takes a Village (and Vision): The Role of Communities and Interoperability in Next Generation Networks” poster session
  • Dr. Radia Perlman (Distinguished Engineer, Sun Labs) 5 October: “What’s a PKI, why would I want one, and how should it be designed?” invited speech 6 October: introducing keynote speech by Dr. Sally Ride
  • Katy Dickinson (Director, Business Process Architecture, CTO and Sun Labs) 5 October: “Mentoring by the Numbers” panel by Katy Dickinson, with Dr. Carol Muller (Founder, MentorNet), and Dr. Mary Jean Harrold (Georgia Tech)
  • Dr. Gilda Garreton (Staff Engineer, Sun Labs) 5 October: “Latinas in Engineering” BOF (Birds of a Feather)6 October: “Research in Industrial Labs: How Collaboration Aid Innovation” talk by Tarik Ono and Dr. Gilda Garreton
  • Tarik Ono (Staff Engineer, Sun Labs)6 October: “Research in Industrial Labs: How Collaboration Aids Innovation” talk by Tarik Ono and Dr. Gilda Garreton
  • Dr. Susan Landau (Distinguished Engineer, Sun Labs) 6 October: “Non-Traditional Ways to Advance Your Career” panel

Links and references updated 28 March 2014

Leave a comment

Filed under Hopper - Anita Borg Institute, Mentoring & Other Business

Tagged as , , , ,

October 5, 2006 · 11:09 pm

The Role of User Research in the Product Development Process

I was not able to stay for this entire panel but I wanted to be there for as long as possible because of two of the panelists: Jenny Gove and Robin Jeffries. Both are interesting women and very capable professionals who were my coworkers and hallmates at Sun Microsystems before they went to Google. Even though some of the panel’s presentations were superficial, it is always interesting to hear from user experience engineers. This is one of the few computer science disciplines in which women and men seem to participate in roughly equal numbers.

Of particular interest on this panel were some of the comments of Kaaren Hanson of Intuit. Her description of how the success of Quick Books in serving small businesses was ignored for several years was funny and I liked her conclusion that a company needs to be prepared to take advantage of surprises. If I remember her numbers correctly, Quick Books now brings in more than a quarter of Intuit’s revenue.

Blog with regard to a panel presented at the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2006

25 October 2013 – links and text updated

Leave a comment

Filed under Hopper - Anita Borg Institute

Tagged as , ,

August 30, 2005 · 8:46 am

Productivity Project

For the last six months, a team with members from both Sun Microsystems’ Software Group and from the Chief Technologist’s Office has been working on a new system to measure software engineering team productivity. This grew out of discussions about the Global Engineering Cost Tool, an internal process and web-based tool developed two years ago in a collaboration between Sun’s Chief Technologist’s Office, Human Resources, Workplace Resources, and Finance.

The Global Product Engineering Cost Tool provides high-level cost comparisons of Sun’s Global Product Engineering (GPE) locations. The Cost Tool provides a reliable and easy to use application that is available long-term, providing the same data about each site, using the same assumptions and updated on a regular schedule. The tool provides a planning vehicle to compare GPE sites. The information in the Cost Tool is static in nature (estimates) and does not reflect the real actual cost. Information is only included if reliable and consistent data is available.

When we contact the Cost Tool users and stakeholders for satisfaction ratings and suggestions, their need for additional non-cost information has often been raised. We finally put on the Cost Tool home page

“Quantified costs do not include many key factors which need to be assessed when considering the advantages of a site. Availability and quality of talent, ease of doing business, ability to distribute team/work, productivity, and other factors must also be evaluated.”

Of these non-cost areas not in the Cost Tool, productivity information seems to be most requested.

After the Cost Tool signoff meeting last December, Tanya Jankot and I got into a discussion with one of our executive stakeholders about productivity. After much talk, we realized that productivity is a high-level measure that is a function of many distinct and often unrelated factors. Without general agreement on the influence factors, success measures, and costs that contribute to productivity and their relative correlation to it, it is impossible to measure and influence productivity effectively. There is a need to understand the factors that contribute to productivity which can be controlled so that it will be possible to begin to measure, analyze, and influence components of productivity.

We first did a great deal of research on what productivity information and systems were already available. We considered the writings and ideas of Barry Boehm, Frederick Brooks, Alistair Cockburn, Geert Hofstede, Walt Scacchi and many others. We then started talking with Sun executives. After reviewing publications from business, government, and the academic world, plus holding dozens of interviews, we came to some conclusions:

  1. The type of work a software team does has a strong influence on how its productivity is measured. That is, if a team is fixing small bugs to order it might be measured in terms of lines of code or function points but if a team is creating a new feature or engaged in innovative software research,
    the measurements are different.
  2. There are more and more widely used systems for measuring productivity in teams working at the level of fixing bugs to order than for teams doing software research.
  3. Whether a software team is all in one location or is split between locations and whether their manager is located with them or is working at a distance has a strong influence on their productivity.
  4. There does not seem to be an existing system that can easily measure productivity in the full range of types of software projects.

25 October 2013 – formatting and links updated

1 Comment

Filed under Mentoring & Other Business

Tagged as , ,