From your question's title and description, it sounds to me that you're trying to find ways to cope with a situation while waiting for a transition, but you're certain that you need to make a transition. I think the best thing to do in this case is to see if you can transition quicker due to your mental health, but these kinds of situations can also help us grow, so I'd take advantage of that while waiting.

You're right that the current economy can add more challenges to career moves, but you already mentioned you may have other offers, so it's not totally bad as it was one year ago. Still, it is important to assess how much risk making a change would be for you, but I also think it's valid to reflect on the risk of **not** changing. You mentioned your work's speed and quality decreased, do you see a short term solution for this or not?

If not, I'd try to improve my performance as soon as possible, whether by improving my efficiency, removing myself from useless meetings and focusing on one thing at the time. Also remaining calm during stressful situations and working on your professional image/brand. If I were in such situation you described, I'd try my best to learn from it by improving the previous points while waiting for that much anticipated transition.

Software Engineer at Microsoft

Luciana Marques

From your message, I understood that you want to advance your technical skills, possibly by designing a medium to large scale system from scratch so you can go from mid-level to senior. You're also debating if you should go to a startup or big tech, but you sounded pretty sure to me that you don't want to be on your current company.

So answering each of these topics one by one:

**Advancing your technical skills**

This is a broad topic that you can achieve in many ways. In one of my teams we used to have a % of time in which we could spend learning topics instead of doing feature work. I highly encourage this even if your team doesn't have a formal structure. Learning is part of being a software engineer, you will always inevitably need to study new things. What worked for me was listing the most pressing topics for my day job, and find Coursera courses that covered them (I'm particularly a fan of their Google/Meta certificates). Then, also identify skills that I had to learn for my future self, that were not going to be immediately helpful but would definitely be in the long term.

**Looking for system design opportunities**

You mentioned you want to design something from scratch, but depending on the company or the team you are, these opportunities might be super rare. This  doesn't mean though you won't be able to design something.

Have you mentioned to your manager that you want to do this? Maybe there might be a new feature coming up that will require building a new system, even if it's small it's still a good opportunity.

In terms of the system's size for scalability, this depends a lot on your team's context, so making a switch might be inevitable. Just don't stop learning and trying to find opportunities in your current team since we don't know when you will have the opportunity of switching.

**Getting a promotion from mid-level to senior engineer**

We finally got to what seems to be the reason for your question. But, while learning and designing systems are definitely important to a senior engineer, promotions are not only based on individual impact but also a lot on relationships and processes. Have you mentioned to your manager that you want to be promoted? Have you checked your company's definition of what a senior engineer is expected to do? Have you created a plan alongside with your manager of how you can grow to be already achieving such expectations? The previous two sections can be quite irrelevant if you haven't done any of this.

**Startup vs. Big Tech**

There are other threads here in Taro that answer this question specifically, so I recommend reading them if that's really something you want to consider. I believe startups can have more opportunities to design something from scratch as opposed to bigger companies with more stablished products. But, I think you need to ask yourself other questions apart from if you'll have more system design opportunities, because startup and big tech work environments as a whole have both a lot more pros and cons to consider.

Playlist for helping me with side projects

Side Projects

Career Level

Code Quality

Senior Project

To Answer Later

After getting a foothold in the industry, engineers become mid-level. Most engineers stay at this level for quite a while as they navigate the senior engineer promotion (L4 -> L5 by FAANG leveling), which generally requires becoming a tech lead.