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The IEC, Sun India's R&D centre stands at
the forefront of Sun's global engineering strategy. With a staff
strength of 600 it happens to be the largest such facility outside
the United States and a 'core engineering site' for Sun. Today,
the IEC has over 70 engineers working on Application Server technology
in India and this number is growing. Application Server 7.0 EE (the
high availability version) was developed and released out of India
in September 2003. This software is being used by Telstra, Vodaphone,
S&P and other Fortune 500 firms. The IEC team owns version 7.1
entirely and will continue to own whole releases in the future.
 The
IEC has some innovative programmes of which the Sun Engineering
Enrichment and Development (SEED) is one of the most prominent.
This programme helps engineers advance their careers and job satisfaction
through mentoring by senior staff at Sun-including distinguished
engineers, vice-presidents, fellows and directors. The programme
is run globally by Katy Dickinson, Sun Sigma Master Black Belt and
process architect, CTO and Sun Labs, who worked with Sun Human Resources
in developing and launching SEED as an Engineering Best of the Best
(BOB) programmes in 2001.
Sun's CTO, Dr Greg Papadopoulos, is the SEED programme's
executive sponsor. So far, 200 Sun employees have participated in
the SEED programme as mentees, and over 130 as mentors. SEED is
only two years old. Before SEED, there was a programme called Sun
Visor that paired up people for mentoring. It is still popular and
involves new engineers and experienced people being paired off.
A culture of innovation
It all boils down to creating a culture of innovation,
something that Sun prides itself on. "Innovations didn't happen
because someone came in and started generating stuff like NFS and
Java. We want to create people like James Gosling. These are the
kind of people who are mentoring young engineers at Sun. I link
up these people to the best in the company for a year," says
Vijay Anand, managing director, India Engineering Centre, Sun Microsystems
India.
The goal is to infuse Sun's global R&D culture
into the IEC. "The next Java innovation should happen from
India," says Anand.
India gets about 20 to 25 percent of the seats
in this programme. Over 50 percent of the employees who take part
in the SEED programme have been promoted.
From techies to managers
SEED has two streams. The first is the new hire
programme (NHP) wherein new college hires who have recently joined
Sun get teamed up with VPs, fellows and distinguished engineers.
NHP lasts for a year. The other variant of SEED is the established
staff programme where folks with over five years of experience and
good prior reviews can join. In this case the programme duration
is six months.
Last year, the SEED programme was extended to
budding managers with eight to ten years experience. "We have
paired (managers) with VPs. Four to five of the IEC managers (out
of 20) enrolled in the first batch," says Anand. This version
of the SEED programme focuses on how to think strategically and
helps the mentees act as leaders and get their visibility up across
Sun.
Sun Sigma-inspired by GE
Sun has a HR programme called Sun Sigma that's
derived from Six Sigma. This GE motivated programme has been adapted
to R&D. The goal is to make decisions that are data-driven and
thereby gain full acceptance from the team. The mentoring programme
is based on the Sun Sigma process.
Remote communication and Sun U
Communication and presentation skills are essential
in Sun India when everybody in India who works on a team is part
of a cross-site (across geographies) team. Communicating over phone
isn't as easy as doing so face-to-face. There are dos and don'ts
regarding communicating over e-mail. Best practices that work remotely
over e-mail and phone or even face-to-face in conference calls are
taught. Reading body language in such situations is difficult; Sun
employees are trained to deal such situations.
For developing writing skills there's Sun University.
There is a Sun University manager in India whose responsibility
is to conduct courses on both technology and soft skills. The idea
is to raise the bar when it comes to good technical writing.
There's even a course that teaches US managers
and engineers about working with India. "The course on working
with India is very popular. It teaches people about what the demands
and time constraints are so that people working in the US can watch
when they schedule meetings and notify people in advance. The idea
is to make sure that there are no calls at 2 am," says Anand.
Continuing education courtesy SEED
The SEED programme pays for continuing education
by supporting external registration with IISc or correspondence
courses with Stanford. Sun sends staff engineers on two-three customer
site visits along with sales or support engineers. This helps them
understand how the sales cycle works, what Sun's product positioning
is so that the SEED mentees can come back and pass on the knowledge
that they've gained from their outing in the real world to the rest
of the engineering team.
Mentors and mentees
An interesting facet of SEED is that a person
can be a mentee and later on a mentor or even vice versa. "I
was a mentee two-and-a-half years ago. Today, I'm a mentor,"
says Raju Alluri, senior staff engineer, IEC.
The Solaris Sustaining Engineering (SSE) team
at Sun IEC owns every Solaris version from the day it is shipped.
It also works on the N1 grid computing platform. "I'm a SEED
mentee this year, two of my engineers were mentees last year. I
want to be an executive at Sun and need somebody to help me chart
out my career. Last night I went through the steps of developing
my career plan with my mentor, Tom Stevens, vice president-customer
advocacy," says Joseph George, manager of Solaris Sustaining
Engineering at the IEC.
The SEED programme helps George identify the skills
that he needs to work upon. He meets his mentor every fortnight
and they identify a skill that George can work on. For instance,
it could be about using the Sigma data to make decisions; what are
the tools in the Sigma portfolio and how can George use them in
the workplace?
The programme encourages mentees to work with
their mentor on a common Sigma project where the mentor gets a chance
to evaluate the mentee and give feedback.
One of the engineers on George's team wanted to
go up the technical ladder. His mentor was Erik Nordmak, one of
the architects of networking in Solaris. The project they worked
upon involved helping Erik come up with an RFC (Request for Comment).
The mentee attended an IETF meeting with Erik in San Francisco.
"He's two years out of college and I can see the difference
in him. He's the member of a team that works on Solaris Security
vulnerabilities, he's the only engineer in IEC who works on security,"
comments George.
Piyali Nag, senior technical lead-application
server, Sustaining Engineering Group at the IEC is a technical person
who wanted to get into the executive line. Her job involves doing
technical management and engineering planning for releases. Whenever
an application server product gets released Nag's group takes it
up and works on it.
Nag had been told in performance reviews that
she had the soft skills required but didn't know how to map them.
Diann Olden is her SEED mentor. Diann has worked with lots of groups
and is a non-technical person. "She brought the non-technical
view into the picture. Diann helped me make a good career plan that
has helped raise my visibility," says Nag. Nag and Olden are
working on a process project that will help Nag improve her way
of working.
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