Career Advice About Yahoo

As a mid-level (not senior yet) SDE, what are the core skills I should be consistently developing to grow my career, not only for promotion within the company, but also for personal growth, and to get ready for diverse opportunities years ahead?

I know we have covered lots of topics, like DS & Algo for interviews in case you suddenly get laid off and you are looking for opportunities, communicate well with colleagues to make impact, and manage up to avoid getting into PIP, System Design skills.... But is there a list of Soft AND Hard skills that are core to a engineer's career in long term?

As I gain more experience working at this team, I have been eventually onboarded to work on different projects with different contexts, and finally arrived at a point where multiple bottlenecks kick in at one time. For example, I need someone(s) to unblock me, do knowledge transfers, while they are typically very busy; I need to spend time on building understanding on new stuff on my own; I also need to spend time on undocumented work (being a resource to other engineers for some of the work I have done, unexpected work request (enhancements, API revision...) flows into my plate, technical debt, review PRs, checking in teammates' progresses, planning and retrospect work efficiency improvement, and etc.). The goal is to make sure I am not blocking other's work, and deliver with speed and quality, as well as meeting Team's priorities (not even mentioning books and tutorials learning besides day-to-day tasks)

My manager has recently expressed concern on my delivery speed and quality, so what could be my next steps? Thanks in advance.

I know there are a lot going on approaching the end of year in the company/team for everyone, across different levels people are busy with retrospection and planning for next year. For year-end check-in with my manager, I plan to talk about performance as usual, discuss the promotion timeline/expectations, possibly ask about the bonus I should expect to receive? I am hesitating about asking questions on Bonus which should have settled based on my performance in the past year, is it meaningful to mention Bonus in our conversation, or just show your interest in how to perform better rather than how much bonus you are getting this year and how much more you expect to get.

Besides above topics, what else should we cover in Year-End Conversations? Or probably with whom should we have conversations except our managers, so that we can have better understanding on what we did really well or needs improvements on, and lay out action plans for next year? Thank you!