Answered from How to Progress Faster Than Everyone Else (as an engineer) · A Life Engineered · 2026-10-23
Steve Huynh says promotion committees do fuzzy math, adding up contributions against thresholds. Contributions from one project compare apples to apples, while work spread across many projects forces an apples-to-oranges comparison the committee lacks information for, so the easy outcome is to pass and cite unclear impact. When reorganized into Prime Video as a senior engineer, Huynh chose a high-visibility project with a tight deadline over a team with many medium projects and legacy systems.
Source: our own transcription of the episode. The full conversation is on A Life Engineered (2026-10-23). Read the whole episode summary →