The time to search for your next job is always. Give a crappy code review and spend that time taking a recruiters call.
Complete anecdata, but engineers have been some of the best treated employees at the companies I've worked at.
For some FANG companies that even works for promotions, they won't give you a promotion, but if you leave you can be re-hired at the next level after ~1-2 years.
As soon as you have done that, they give far less consideration to you.
New recruits can get a far better package than people already there. Your replacement will get paid more than they were willing to pay you.
The problem is that the day you are promoted, you don’t actually make that much more in TC because so much of it comes from equity, which is only updated once a year and stretches for four years. Thus, it takes up to four years to hit the steady-state comp at the new level. In contrast, new hire packages need to be competitive for folks who have already been at their level for many years.
Oh, but they are that stupid.
What does this mean? Like, open a PR with bad code?
That review time is converted to interview time.