Distractions Are Potential Killers. Be stubborn. Don't let go of projects.

Distractions Are Potential Killers. Be stubborn. Don’t let go of projects.

• From the article “Harsh Truths for Success from Linus Torvalds”

Silicon Valley culture is based on software engineers who change their jobs very frequently. What are the effects of this? I think there are two. First, by doing this, technological ideas and improvements are scattered between companies. Secondly, it started a competition to hire the most experienced engineers, which has made compensations to hire such people higher and higher. In these companies, there are amazing offices with free offered food, and high compensation numbers. With all of these shiny objects, lots of people want to be a part of them.

Like everything else, this comes with a cost we generally don’t notice. Every company has its own system, own implementation style with different techniques. Before we learn every detail in one of them and work on a project long enough, we are leaving companies. Today, in most of the big companies, the average staying time of engineers is lower than 2 years.

What is bad about it? What is a different perspective? Linus Torvalds started working in one of the Silicon Valley companies (Transmeta) and instead of moving around the companies, he stayed at this company for almost 7 years until laying the foundations of the Linux Foundation. Why did he do that? Why didn’t he move between companies like others? Concerning what he said in his TED Talk interview,

he’s very stubborn and didn’t let go of the projects.

In fact, he’s so stubborn that he’s been working on the same project for more than 25 years.

Warren Buffet applied the same mentality in the investment industry and applied the same simple but effective strategy for a long time and made it perfect. Eventually, he became the richest man.

Success comes to people who focus on something but not the ones who are moving from project to project.

This advice is not for everybody, because some of us do software engineering only for money and there is nothing wrong with it. However, there are lots of people who want to create great things.

And the only way to do this is to focus.

Lots of people are working to achieve different things simultaneously.

If you want to be successful, to create something other people and you want to use, then you really need to focus on the problems and the projects you want and stick with that.