Why does Steve Huynh say working harder will not grow your engineering career?

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.

• Huynh says he dealt with insistent meeting invites by offering to review his priorities with his VP, which usually ended the request.
• Huynh calls himself a recovering people pleaser and says saying no felt uncomfortable at first.

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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