The commercial side of being the whole team: contracts, rates, tax treatment across jurisdictions, and the decisions that quietly determine whether independent work is still sustainable in year three. Calm coverage of high-stakes situations, including account terminations, lost clients, and failed products, the kind usually written about only in retrospect and only when they ended well.
The 'software engineer salary' number everyone quotes is a self-reported, Big-Tech-skewed average. Real BLS and Stack Overflow data, by market.
What actually separates a staff engineer from a senior one, why small companies make the jump harder to see, and what reliably moves people past the ceiling.