Things You Think Are Helping Your Career But Are Actually Hurting It
The things holding your career back are probably the things you're most proud of.
Early in my Amazon career, I was the person who fixed everything. Something broke? I was on it. Someone needed help? I was there. I worked harder than almost anyone on my team, and I got great feedback from my peers.
But I also stalled my career, and for the longest time, I couldn’t figure out why.
It took me years to realize that some of the things I was most proud of were the things that had been holding me back.
The habits I thought were helping my career were, in fact, keeping me stuck. And the worst part was that my manager, even my skip-level, thought I was doing a great job.
Just not the kind of great job that grows your career.
Later, over 10 years of sitting on performance calibration meetings at Amazon, I saw this pattern all the time. A manager would pitch someone for a high performance rating. They’d talk about how hard this person worked and how much the team depended on them. The room would nod, and then the conversation would move on. These traits were simply not taken into consideration.
After years of coaching thousands of engineers, I can spot these mistakes in about five minutes. They’re the same every time. And the people making them almost never see them, because these habits don’t feel like mistakes in the moment. They feel like you’re doing your job well.
Here are four career mistakes that look like good ideas.
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1. Being the person who fixes everything
Every team has a designated fixer. Something breaks, and they’re on it. Someone’s stuck, and they get the Slack. They’re reliable under pressure, so they end up in every escalation whether they signed up for it or not.
If this is you, I get it. I was this person for years. People depend on you, and your manager trusts you with the hard stuff. It feels especially good for people-pleasers like I was.
But behind the scenes, you’re slowly getting typecast. In your manager’s head, you’re The Fixer. That means when the greenfield project comes along, the one with high visibility and so much potential, they pass on you. They think to themselves, “What if something catches on fire? Who better than [insert your name] to put it out?”
Another problem is more subtle. When you prevent fires, the work is often invisible. Valuable work, but hard to write up as impact at review time. “Kept things from falling apart” doesn’t land quite the same way as “built the new system that handles 1 million customers.”
I want to be clear: please don’t stop fixing things.
If you can diagnose problems quickly and operate under pressure, that’s a real skill.
But you need an exit strategy for every fire you walk into.
The best exit strategy is to fix the problem for good so it never comes back. That’s the version of fixing that shows up in the performance review meeting: you didn’t just put out a fire, you rebuilt the building so it doesn’t burn anymore.
The next best thing is to uplevel your team so that others know how to address these types of issues.
Either way, you need that exit strategy.
What to do: Next time you get pulled into a fire, fix it, then ask yourself why there was a fire in the first place. If the cause is systemic, propose the long-term fix and own that. If that sounds like a lot of work, it usually isn’t. From my experience, it typically comes down either to a set of action items that anybody on your team can take, or the action needed to drive this takes place outside of your team. This is how you can turn the firefighting into a project that people will recognize, and the work largely consists of tracking the actions and making sure they aren’t forgotten.
2. Saying yes to everything
This one’s tricky, because on its own, each individual “yes” is always reasonable. That’s what makes this so hard to spot. Your manager asks if you can take on one more small thing, or a teammate needs help with their project. What do you do? You say yes
The problem shows up later.
Every yes to something small is a deprioritization of something big. You end up stretched across four or five things, doing C+ work on all of them, and when review time comes, your manager can’t point to a single thing that you’ve driven from start to finish.
The activity where I saw this the most was interviewing. I was an Amazon Bar Raiser, which meant I was obligated to do 3 interviews a week. Recruiters and other hiring managers would always ping me, as Bar Raisers were required for every interview loop. Every time I said yes to extra interviews, it felt so good, because they would shower me with gratitude.
But the math is simple. You have a finite amount of time and energy.
Every yes to something small is a deprioritization of something big.
This doesn’t mean you must become unhelpful. Please be helpful to others. But it is very important to be deliberate about where you spend your effort. Before you say yes, ask yourself: Will this matter in 6 months? Will anyone remember I did this? If the answer to both is no, you need to find a polite way to decline or delegate.
What to do: Look at everything on your plate right now. Pick the one or two things that you genuinely care about or would show up in a promotion doc or your performance review. Give those things your best energy. For everything else, you should have the courage to say no to them if it would take away from your priorities.
3. Solving problems others should know about
You’re capable and independent. When something goes wrong, you handle it, but your manager or team never hears about it. Why? Because you took care of it. You think this selflessness helps your team because they didn’t have to spend energy thinking about it.
In a way, it does. But it also means your manager has no idea how much complexity you’re managing. They know about the projects you shipped, but they don’t know about the 5 things that almost went sideways but didn’t because you caught them in time.
This is the invisible work problem. The more capable you are, the more problems you solve quietly, and the easier your job looks from the outside. Your manager sees smooth execution and thinks everything’s going fine. They don’t realize that “going fine” required you to make ten judgment calls this week that a less experienced person would have gotten wrong.
You don’t need to trumpet everything you do. Nobody appreciates a person who turns every minor issue into an announcement. But when you provide air cover for your team, tell them about it. Not to brag, but just to make sure they know what is going on.
Think about it from your manager’s perspective. When they walk into a calibration meeting and someone asks, “What’s the evidence that this person is a high-performer?” Your manager needs specific examples. If you solved every problem silently, they won’t have any. You made their job harder by making yours look easy.
What to do: Start a lightweight habit of flagging the hard stuff to your manager or team after you’ve handled it. In your next 1:1, mention the problem, what you did, and why it mattered. One sentence is enough. There is no benefit to silent sacrifice.
4. Making yourself too easy to manage
If you never push back or raise concerns or create any sort of friction, for example, when they tell you what your raise is (or that you’re not getting one), you never question it or ask for more, your manager will love you. Why? Because you require zero maintenance.
This may feel like professionalism, but it’s not. It’s quite the opposite.
The people who grow their careers are the ones whose managers are actively involved. They surface issues and challenge things, and they create what I’d call “productive friction.” Their manager engages with them as a peer, not just by assigning them work and checking in when it’s done.
When you’re too easy to manage, your manager will spend all their mental energy elsewhere. And you will simply blend into the walls.
There’s a version of this that’s especially dangerous for high performers. You’re doing great work, and your manager knows it. So you coast along on that continued assumption. You don’t raise issues in meetings because you don’t want to slow things down. You don’t push back on a bad decision because you’re confident you can make it work anyway.
I’m not saying you should become a difficult person. But if your manager never hears you disagree with anything, they’re not getting your best thinking. Share your opinions. Push back when something doesn’t sit right. Tell your manager what you want before they have to guess. The best professional relationships are never totally free of at least some tension.
What to do: In your next 1:1, bring one thing you disagree with or one idea you’ve been sitting on. It doesn’t have to be big. The idea is to break the pattern of nodding along and taking your assignments. If your manager never has to wrestle with a question or a pushback from you, they’re not thinking about you enough.
Spotting these mistakes is the easy part. Changing the habits behind them is harder, especially when you've been rewarded for them your whole career. That's what Top Tier is for. I work with engineers who are good at their jobs but stuck in their careers, and we figure out together what needs to change and how to change it without burning everything down. If that sounds like where you are, take a look.
The Work Changes. Most People Don’t.
Every one of these mistakes has the same root, which is that you’re being passive with your career. You’re optimizing for being good at your current scope, quietly, instead of building the case for a bigger scope, loudly.
The fix is simple: Stop trying to make everyone else’s life easier, and start making your own career harder to ignore.
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Yeah. People pleasing is a disease and it leads nowhere. It may feel good but the MAIN ISSUE is people become overly dependent on you. It becomes a bottleneck in the long run. What happens when you leave? Now there is someone else who needs to take over and get up to speed.
I like the ol' politely decline and delegate part 😁.
You are such a legend. As someone who’s about to start his tech career, thank you for this! I can see exactly how these things could hold someone back from growing their career- it seems like it all falls into non-promotable work