What does Steve Huynh mean by notable work, and why does it come before visibility?

Steve Huynh, a former Amazon principal engineer who runs the A Life Engineered channel, defines notable work as work that either has meaningful impact or makes you an outlier. Impact is a measurable change in a metric, and it is meaningful only if people care about that metric, with money the easiest one to understand. He argues that seeking visibility before the work is notable just draws attention to mediocre output.

• Huynh illustrates the point with a National Geographic editor who told a young photographer his technically perfect photos lacked an interesting subject.
• Early in his career Huynh tracked how many interviews he ran, but what people actually cared about was how many good hires were made, which nobody measured.
• Huynh says impact that cannot be measured, such as developer experience, may be real but usually earns no credit.

▸In their words

“I highly suggest before you start a bunch of work, ask yourself, how will I measure the impact?” Steve Huynh · at 3:27 — open in the transcript →

Source: our own transcription of the episode. The full conversation is on A Life Engineered (2026-10-12). Read the whole episode summary →

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