What is the difference between difficult and complex work according to Steve Huynh?

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.

• Huynh's test is whether showing up and doing the work would eventually finish the task; if not, stop adding hours and start asking questions.
• As a junior engineer, Huynh says, every batch-processing failure case he handled exposed more, until he needed a different approach.

▸In their words

“When you don't know what to do, working harder means doing more of the wrong thing.” Steve Huynh · at 11:59 — open in the transcript →

Source: our own transcription of the episode. The full conversation is on A Life Engineered (2026-11-02). Read the whole episode summary →

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