A Life Engineered · A Life Engineered · Transcript & summary by WhipScribe
It gives engineers a concrete case, backed by an Amazon principal engineer's own ratings, for doing less but better-chosen work to get promoted.
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“If you want to change where you are, you have to change what you do.” Steve Huynh · at 17:31 — open in the transcript →
Steve Huynh, who spent 20 years at Amazon and reached principal engineer, argues that effort is the wrong lever for career growth. His evidence is personal: in 2022, while building his YouTube channel alongside the job, he limited himself to work that would appear on his annual review, declined optional meetings, and still earned the top performance rating every year until he left.
The mechanics he offers are about focus and framing. Spreading attention across several projects, he estimates, cuts the impact of each far below an even share, because context switching eats the day; one or two protected focus blocks daily are his alternative. Growth also needs its own time, separate from deadline work, and he describes how to put promotion on a manager's agenda without handing them homework. He separates difficult tasks, where hours help, from complex ones, where the first job is turning unknowns into a list of steps, and he treats getting promoted as a complex problem.
The cost side closes the talk. A burst of extra output resets what a manager expects, so returning to a normal pace reads as decline. Stories about Peter Yang leaving Roblox and Ethan Evans, a retired Amazon VP, frame the personal price. Huynh's verdict is that promotion comes from wider scope and creating projects, not more volume. About a minute mid-video promotes his paid Top Tier coaching program.
Steve Huynh, a former Amazon principal engineer, says extra hours mostly make you more valuable in the job you already have, and nobody at a performance review counts hours. He cites his own 2022 experience: he cut back to only the work that would show on his review while building a YouTube channel, and still received Amazon's top performance rating every year until he quit.
Steve Huynh estimates from experience that splitting time between two projects yields roughly 20% of each one's impact rather than 50%, and three projects about 8% each. Parallel projects also land later: two two-week projects done in sequence finish at two and four weeks, but done together both land in about a month. He blames context switches, noting it takes about 15 minutes to settle into real work.
Steve Huynh recommends blocking 60 to 90 minutes a day for a single priority project with no email or Slack. During the block only two things are allowed: doing the work or doing nothing at all, with no phone, snacks or fidgeting. He says one such block a day puts most people in the top 10% of performers, and two blocks a day the top 1%, because everyone else at work is distracted.
Steve Huynh advises against asking what it takes to get promoted in the last minutes of a one-on-one, which gives a busy manager a big task and earns a vague reply. Instead, ask to bring ideas on how you could grow to the next meeting, then arrive with a one-page comparison of your work against the next level's criteria, placed first on the agenda. Revisit it for about 10 minutes monthly.
Steve Huynh defines difficult work as hard but clear: you know the steps, so more hours finish it faster. Complex work has no obvious starting point, and adding effort makes it worse. The fix is disambiguation, turning unknowns into a list of known tasks, often by asking the right people. He says getting promoted is itself a complex problem, so repeating what earned past rewards keeps people at their current level.
Steve Huynh argues that exceptional output quickly becomes the baseline. If your sustainable pace is two projects a quarter and you push to three by working nights, your manager sees only three and expects it again; returning to two then looks like decline. He says this is how people have their hardest year and still get a meets-expectations rating, and he recommends sprints only when they have a clear end.
Our own transcript of the public episode, with a timestamp about every 90 seconds. Tap a timestamp or the link button on a paragraph to copy a link that opens this page there.
0:00You can't grow your career by working harder. Almost everyone tries. They add hours, but all it does is make them more valuable in the job that they already have. I spent 20 years at Amazon and reached Principal Engineer, a title only 1% of engineers hold. But I was only able to do that by following four career principles that allowed me to leap ahead and land my dream promotion, while working less than everyone else around me. And it all starts with principle number one. Nobody cares how hard you work. Even if you could get ahead in your career by working 9am to 9pm six days a week, it would be a horrible trade. Why live to work? The good news is that working more is a flawed strategy from the beginning.
0:42The amount of work you do is a terrible measure of progress. Nobody at your next performance review is going to care about how many hours of work you put in. Let me prove it. In 2022, I was a principal engineer at Amazon and a principal engineer's calendar is bonkers. Conflicting meetings back to back to back. Me joining every meeting that I'd been added to as optional. My work calendar looked like a game of Tetris gone horribly wrong. And my YouTube channel was starting to take off. I decided to go all in on YouTube while still working at Amazon. Amazon is known for grinding people into a fine dust. The hard work answer was to do it all. Keep the full-time Amazon load and put YouTube on top. But it was impossible.
1:26I simply ran out of hours during the week. So I made one rule. I would only do the work that was going to show up on my performance review at the end of the year. That turned out to be a surprisingly small but critical amount of work. Of course, people pushed back. I'm not going. Bro, you're required. You gotta be there. Okay, if you wanna talk about my priorities, let's get you, me, and my VP on a call. And we'll decide if this is the most important thing that I should work on. Hey, you know what? You're optional, buddy. Don't worry about it. We got it. That would usually get them to go away. That's how I ended up saying no to all the extra meetings, all the extra work, and just focusing on my highest priority.
2:09It was a little bit uncomfortable, I'll be honest. I'm a recovering people pleaser. But then a weird thing happened. I got top tier, the highest performance rating, both that year and every year after that, till I quit. The reason working less will often get you further than working harder is simple. If you split your time between two projects, you'd expect to get 50% of the impact of each task, right? You don't. In my experience, you get maybe 20% of the impact of each. With three, it's like 8% each. Make yourself responsible for 10 things and your impact practically can't be measured. On top of this, if you do projects in parallel, they land at the same time, but later. Do two two-week projects back to back and the first one lands in two weeks.
2:59Do them at the same time and both land in a month from now, if you're lucky. What causes that gap? Context switches. Every time you shift your focus from one thing to another, it absolutely kills your productivity. It takes about 15 minutes to get into the swing of real work. And the average knowledge worker checks their email every six minutes. So if you've got 10 things on your plate, your entire day is context switches. A little bit of this, a little bit of that. You're doing 10 things at the lowest quality possible. You don't get bonus points for quantity. Think back over your last year. I guarantee you can't remember the small stuff. Neither can anyone else. So pull up everything on your plate and ask one question of each item.
3:38Will this show up on my performance review? Most of it won't. Pick the one project that will and that you can meaningfully move this month. Work on that first, not on top of everything else. That means saying no to things, which feels kind of crazy at first. The optional meetings are the easy ones. Skip those. The harder part is when someone tells you that their thing can't wait. When that happens, do what I did. Make sure you sync with your manager on the top things that you need to work on. If someone comes in with an out-of-band request, ask them to sit down with you and your manager and work out whether it beats your established priorities. It puts those things at risk. You can have a conversation about whether a reprioritization
4:20is warranted. Now that you've got some room in your week, you have to protect it. Block 60 to 90 minutes a day where you work on that one thing and nothing else. No email, no slack. I literally use this timer. Rotate it and you've got your focus block. If you like this one, I'll leave a link down below. During your focus block, you're allowed to do two things, the work or nothing. Both are acceptable. If you're not working, that's fine, but there's nothing in between. No fiddling with your pen, no phone, no getting up for a snack. You just stare at the wall, that's it, or you do your work. You'll find that you can't sit there doing nothing for very long before the work that you've been avoiding
5:04starts to look pretty attractive one 60 to 90 minute block of focus a day in my experience is enough to put you in the top 10 of people with an exceeds expectation rating headed your way if you can do two focus blocks a day that alone will easily put you in the top one percent of job performance the reason is because everybody at work is distracted, so nothing gets done. Becoming a top performer is easy if you can simply focus on one thing, but being great at your job is not the same thing as growing your career. Which brings us to principle number two. Work on your career, not in your job. You can work hard at your job for years and never spend a single hour on your career. Most people I coach mash those two things together. Your job is the stuff with the deadline
5:51on it. The project, the tickets, whatever is due on Friday. Somebody is always asking you about it, so it gets done. Your career is different. Where do you want to end up and what would it take to get there? Nobody is going to ping you about that. That includes the one person who could help you the most, your manager. I did this myself. Early on at Amazon, I'd walk into my one-on-ones with a whole plan to talk about my career. I had it mapped out. The next promotion, where I thought I stood, and what I wasn't doing enough of. And then my manager and I would spend the whole meeting on status updates. Is it on track? What's blocking you? That's what one-on-ones turn into. I wasn't even annoyed about it in the moment.
6:37That stuff mattered that week. But every single time we hit the last three minutes and we weren't even done with the updates. Okay, I think that covers the updates. So there's one more thing that I wanted to... Shoot, I've got a hard stop. Next week? Next week. So I'd tell myself I'd bring it up next week. Then my manager would go on vacation and suddenly four weeks had passed. Here's what I didn't understand back then. My manager was never going to bring it up for me. And even when you do get close, managers are really good at pushing that conversation down the road. Great topic. Let's find time for it after the launch. There's always another launch. There are two reasons that managers do this. First, your manager's busy.
7:21They have a whole team, a boss of their own, and a calendar that looks worse than yours. In a 30-minute one-on-one, the urgent stuff wins every time. Second, supporting someone else's growth is a lot of work. They have to figure out where you stand, find the gaps, find the right projects, and then go sell it to their own boss. My friend Gerge Arosh writes The Pragmatic Engineer. When he became a manager, he built a growth plan for every single one of his direct reports. He did all of that work. And when he shared the plans, 75% of the people were perfectly happy where they were. They didn't want a plan. So he changed his approach to what most managers do. They only put effort into people who
8:03tell them that they want to grow. Managers have limited time, so they spend it on the people who ask. I've had clients who finally told their manager they wanted to get to the next level, and they got promoted within a month. The manager said, I've been thinking about promoting you. I just didn't know that you wanted it. So you have to be the one that brings it up. And the way you bring it up has to respect those two problems. Here's how most people do it. With three minutes left in a one-on-one, they blurt out, So what do I need to do to get promoted? You've just handed a busy person a huge homework assignment with zero warning. So you're going to get a vague answer. Don't worry about title.
8:41Keep doing what you're doing. And then the conversation dies. Here's what I teach instead. At your next one-on-one, say this. I want to talk about how I can grow here, but I don't want to blindside you. Can I come to our next one-on-one with some ideas on what I could be doing better, and we can go over them together? That takes 10 seconds, and the answer is always yes. Look at what you just did. Your manager now knows you want more, which puts you ahead of most of the team. And you took the work off of their plate. Then all you have to do is the homework. You can compare your work to the next level criteria. You could write down what you think is holding you back and a couple of things that you could take on.
9:22One page is plenty. When you bring it in, put it first on the agenda before the status takes over. Now your manager's job is easy. All they have to do is react. Editing a plan takes five minutes. Writing one takes hours. And if your list is wrong, that's great. You just found out what your manager thinks matters and you never would have guessed it on your own. Bring that list back once a month. 10 minutes minutes top of the one-on-one that's how the conversation stays alive but it can be hard to know how to have those conversations or even what the right roadmap looks like for you you only hit inflection points like this a few times in your career i talk to hundreds of engineers every year who are stuck at the same one. That's why I built Top Tier, my coaching program for engineers and scientists who want to jump ahead, get promoted, and break out of their current level.
10:12Inside of Top Tier, we identify the bottleneck in your career, and then we teach you how to take a hammer to it. You work with coaches, including me, who are one to three steps ahead of you. We face the same challenges, and we know how to sidestep the problems that keep great engineers stuck. If you want to learn more, check out the link below. Let's dig into the next principle. Principle number three. Complex things don't require more work. If you don't know what kind of problem you're working on, working hard on it is going to backfire. If your work is challenging, but you know exactly what to do to complete it, that's called difficult work. It's gonna be a slog, but working hard will help you finish it faster.
10:50The second kind of work is the kind where you don't know what the hell to do. There's no clear starting point or a way to attack it. That's complex work. Difficult problems need hard work. Throw it at complex ones and you're gonna make everything worse. I learned this as a junior engineer. I was building a system that processed work in batches and I had to decide what happened when something went wrong. What if the whole batch is bad? What if one item fails? Do I retry the whole thing and redo the work that already succeeded? Or do I retry just the one that failed, which means now I'm tracking partial completion forever? I had no idea. So I did what I always did back then, and I threw more hours at it. And every time I handled one failure case, a couple more showed
11:36up behind it. My head was swimming in edge cases. When I finally shipped, did almost nothing. When a batch hit trouble, it just stopped and alerted a human. More effort was never going to solve the complexity. I eventually had to approach it completely differently with a novel solution, not more of the same. That's the trap with complex problems. When you don't know what to do, working harder means doing more of the wrong thing. Every failure case I handled created two more. The hours were making the problem bigger. Complex problems need a different kind of work first. Disambiguation. You take, I have no idea what to do, and turn it into a list of things you do know how to do. Once you have that list, you have a difficult problem on your
12:22hands, and hard work pays off again. Getting to the next level in your career is a complex problem too. Most people don't know what it takes to get promoted, but they do know what got them rewarded in the past. So they do more of that. I did one project to get here. So I'll work really hard and do three projects. That's treating a complex problem like a difficult one. More of the work you already know how to do cements you at the level that you're already at. So when you're stuck, ask yourself one question. If I kept showing up and doing the work, would this eventually get done? If the answer is yes, put in the hours. This is the one place where working harder pays off. If the answer is no, stop adding hours and start asking questions.
13:06Write down everything that you don't know. What does done look like? What's the smallest version that would count? Then go get answers, and most of them will come from other people. One conversation with the right person can replace a month of guessing on your own. Keep going until you can write out the steps. Once you can, you're back to a difficult problem and you can put your head down. Your career works the same way. That list you're bringing to the manager, that's disambiguation. You're turning how do I get promoted into specific things that you can go and do. And your manager will probably name something that you hadn't considered. It's usually outside your current projects and outside what you're already good at.
13:48The good news is that it's often a lot less work than what you're doing right now. It'll feel harder at first because it's new to you, but hard work can hurt you even when it works. That leads us to principle number four. Hard work becomes the expectation. When you work hard, exceptional work becomes the new expectation. Once that happens, you've raised your own bar. And the reward for hard work is often even more of it, whether you like it or not. My friend Peter Yang recently quit a high-paying job at Roblox. He'd been working crazy hours there while making content on the side. But as he started to approach his next potential promotion, he started to look closer at his boss. That's when he had the horrible realization.
14:29He didn't want his boss's life. It looked way worse than his own. More work with higher expectations. In another universe, Peter would keep grinding, working crazy hours, pushing for the next promotion. Instead, he asked the uncomfortable question, do I even want the life that I get from this promotion? And so he walked away. He quit a probably seven-figure job to work for himself. He'd gone months without having breakfast with his kids. Now he walks his daughter to school. Working hard often leads you somewhere you never wanted to be in the first place. Companies function like simple machines. They add work and see how you handle all of it. If it's all well, they add more. Say your sustainable pace is shipping two projects a quarter. Then for one quarter, you push exceptionally
15:15hard and ship three. To get there, you work nights, you stop going to the gym. Your manager doesn't see any of that. All they see is three projects. So three is what they expect from you going forward. You can't keep that up forever. No one can. So the next quarter, when you take your weekends back and ship two, it looks like you're slipping. From your manager's side, you got worse. And that's how people end up working their hardest year ever and ending up with the meets expectations or low performance rating. Sometimes you have to sprint. Something's on fire or it's the kind of opportunity you only get once. But a sprint is supposed to end. If you burn out, your career is definitely going to stop.
15:58And if you sacrifice your relationships to get there, what's even the point? Ethan Evans, a retired Amazon VP I interviewed on my podcast, told me that he was a C parent to his kids. I told him, a C is an Asian F. Nobody from your company is coming to your funeral. Nobody will mention your company in the eulogy. The only people who will remember that you worked late are your kids. So look at the people two levels above you. Think about their stress and what the job costs their health. Ask yourself, if someone offered me their exact life tomorrow, would I take it? If the answer is no, I'm happy for you. Don't chase a goal that will make you miserable. If the answer is yes, great. Just don't try to get there by doing even more of the same work.
16:46Promotions are an argument that you deserve bigger scope. Go from shipping two projects a quarter to three, and you haven't widened your scope at all. You've just added more volume. Senior engineers are great at being handed a project and then going and finishing it. But the level above that works differently. They create the new projects that then get handed to other people. I call that being upstream. So the next time a project lands on your desk, get curious about where it came from. Somebody scoped it. Who was that? And how did they know that it was worth doing? If you want to get to the next level, don't try to bargain with the universe. I want the promotion. I'll even work harder. Just don't make me change the type of work I do.
17:29But the universe is undefeated. If you want to change where you are, you have to change what you do. No more being the hardest worker at your level. Instead, start working at the next one. That's the only thing that's going to get you ahead. And you'll discover you don't need to work harder to do it. Another thing that next level people do instead of working hard is improve their communication, how you speak and how you're perceived by those around you. To unlock the communication skills of the top 1%, watch this video next.