[Scalanchilis]

It sounds like career path for designers has some similarities with software engineers. I think software engineering can potentially offer a much wider and deeper set of opportunities.

Still, in practice, these growth opportunities can seem far less common than yet another senior full-stack dev position. If you want to work with scale, there's Google, Amazon, etc., but most companies don't really need to engineer for scalability and high availability. They just need to ship some CRUD features yesterday.

At some point, it's worth considering whether it's worth the costs to keep pushing up in career for more interesting work, more money, more status, whatever.