Best skills to increase TC
SDE/SWE path. Best skills? Aws? Azure? React? Leetcode? What backend language?
Negotiation and business acumen skills.
whats the best way to acquire business acumen.
Mostly experience but you can accelerate it by other means as well such as: getting a more experienced mentor, keeping an eye out and being cognizant of the business (how does x feature impact the business? What value does it bring? Return on investment?), including yourself in “boring” leadership/status type meetings to understand what going on in your org, setting up skip 1:1s and simply ask question like, “what are the top risks to our org” or “top commitments we are aiming for”, etc. there are other ways too... but idea is understanding the business, why you do things, and just being aware of your environment. Heads down focusing on libraries, frameworks and technical design concepts are great. But will help you as a technical lead / IC, but it’s not the exponential factor that will grow your TC (unless someone is explicitly looking out for you).
If you're asking about language or technology choice then you've already lost...
Communication skills. Why targeting to be an IC when you can be a manager/director?
Even with management, companies want someone with coding skills.
Gand Chatna.
Hilarious but unfortunately this skill certainly works.
Software engineering, business impact estimation
You are being a prick with paper money, at least wait till it becomes real
Learn to build good, low maintenance, long lasting software. Learn to ask the right questions and work on the most impactful stuff.
Leetcode
Lol. Seems to be the truth!