Have you tried asking for more? If you're actually good at everything you say, you could be making the same amount of cash plus benefits at a FANG, so I'd expect the contracting rate to be much higher.
Both my rates and this keeps people who aren’t serious about working with me away. Anyone else is most likely worth my time and the cost is acceptable because I don’t work a full 40/hr week for the client. I plan the work to be done for a week and let them know. If it takes me 40hrs ok but most don’t.
They’re not paying me for hours logged. They’re paying me for my experience and skills.
For the OP it's probably a lot more dealing with clients and building stuff from the ground up which you don't tend to do at FAANG at all. I'm not saying it's not as important, it's just very different skill wise.
In my personal experience everything except infrastructure and mobile UI favors generalists. The people I worked with were constantly jumping around between backends, protocols, business logic, web UI, test suites, architecture, data analysis, small-scale UI design. This was on public-facing products. I'd expect internal tool teams have even greater need for generalists.
I think some heuristic like "earn double a FAANG income" isn't going to go over well with companies that are getting off the ground. Are the companies stupid for not paying that? Maybe sometimes. But there are definitely way more companies willing to hire someone at $200/hr than at $500/hr.
The calculations are just different for the companies. An operation spending $1B gains a lot by shaving off 1% (and small improvements are not strictly in the domain of specialists). But a new venture with $0 in revenue may have a very real risk of running out of cash one day, even if their product idea is great and well-built. "Hire the best people in the world" seems more prudent for a company who is certain it will pay off.
But to be fair, I guess one should occasionally try asking for high amounts anyways. I think jaquesm had recommended aiming to have 50% of your clients turn you down on the basis of price, to find the sweet spot for a rate.
No, generalists typically get pigeonholed into being specialists, and typically not the field they were the strongest.
For example I'm stronger in backend/devops than frontend, but because I do most of my work in Node.js, more specifically Next.js I'm always billed as a frontend dev, so typical companies just want me to do one thing.
Contracts like generalization because I cover more surface area with relatively smaller costs than paying $150k+ for each role I can do.
I mean if you enjoy that stuff by all means do it, but I prefer to build real stuff that make impact not practice showmanship.