Hi, I'm a software engineer with senior experience and my current employer plans to promote me to a Principal Engineer or Architect position. However, due to the current economic environment, my boss can only promise to promote me "as soon as he can", I trust him that this is his honest motivation.

Meanwhile I got an offer from another company. I get the title senior SWE again, with a salary of 90k€/y (Germany), currently I earn 75k+4k€ from on-call, so it's quite a step up. My boss said he can likely come close to that offer, but as mentioned before, he can only promise and not give anything written, because of the economics.

Currently, I've a very good work-life-balance at my current employer with 100% remote and also very high trust of my peers and uppers, which makes moving things inside the company easy. The other company has 3d remote 2d office.

What would you do?

• Stay for the title, 100% remote, wait until economics are better to get promoted,
• or do you switch, earn more right away, go to office, and further promotions are more distant into the future?

Thank you so much for reading through this. I'm really stuck and I appreciate any opinions.