As far as work goes, maybe instead of changing jobs, I should be changing the way I am doing my job. I'd probably have a better position by now if I did.
On the above paragraph, we can see the sentence, 'I'd probably have a better position by now if I did.'
Now questions,
I really thank everyone in advance.
It's actually a third kind of structure called subjunctive mood. This article has a great depiction of it actually.
The highlights:
[...] the subjunctive mood is used to explore conditional or imaginary situations. [...] Since statements in the subjunctive mood exist outside time, tense applies differently.
[...]
With subjunctive if constructions, things get trickier. In these statements, there is no concrete action, so there is no real tense. However, we still categorize them in terms of when the imagined action would take place.
Basically, in your example sentence, the speaker is describing a situation which is not true: they do not currently have a better position -- they are hypothesizing about what might have happened had reality been different.
That exact example is future subjunctive. Expanding out the contractions and rearranging it makes it a little clearer:
If I did change the way I do my job, I would probably have a better position by now.
Rewriting the sentence to be past subjunctive looks like this:
If I had changed the way I do my job, I would probably have had a better position by now.
In 'I'd probably have a better position by now', is 'would probably have' Conditional mood or Past tense?
"Would" is a modal verb, "have" a bare infinitive. Technically "would" is the past tense of "will". "Would" has various uses, including expressing a conditional (i.e. the result of a particular condition) and expressing the future in the past. Here "I would have" is conditional - it expresses the results that would follow if a certain condition were met.
Some grammars refer to "would have" as the conditional form of the verb or as the conditional "tense". But most grammarians today would not regard English as having a conditional tense nor a conditional mood.
In 'if I did', is 'did' Conditional mood or Past tense?
"Did" is clearly past tense, but it is not talking about the past. Rather, it is talking about a hypothetical. We don't, however, use the term "conditional" for this use of "did" (since the term "conditional" is usually reserved either for verbs with "would" or for conditional sentences).
Some would call this usage the "past subjunctive", but others would argue that the term "subjunctive" is irrelevant here because there is never any indicative/subjunctive distinction in the English past tense - the sole exception (not universally adhered to) being the subjunctive-like use of "were" in the 3rd person singular. As this is the only instance where a distinction can be drawn, it is better regarded as an isolated relic, sometimes dubbed the "irrealis" form..
