| My take from experience and from what I've seen with friends: - Consulting is great for people with good people skills, but it can turn into hell if you haven't them. - It's very easy for experienced workers in some shops to take advantage of the "new meat", and basically shove you their work. Be on the look for that situation. If it happens run as fast as you can. - Find out who are the top performers, get as close as you can. Some of them will just be political hacks, but others are fountains of experience, and learning from them will provide you with invaluable insight into their fields. - Be ready to ship crappy products. Consultancy is about doing things fast and keeping costs down. Nobody expects perfection, although you'll hear business speak like "excellence" repeated constantly. Your bosses know it, your clients know it. If you are the kind of person that has trouble living with that (i.e. perfectionist), you'll be way happier in product orgs. - Insist on meeting the client. Engineering consultancy is 20% about making the thing, 80% about understanding the clients needs and managing their expectations. All the big failures I've seen in consulting come from having middleman between the guy building and the guy talking to the client. You don't need to be there all the time, but enough to not be playing telephone with others about what the client wants. |
Since starting at a product company I’ve been able to build deep expertise, but I still rely on those consulting skills when talking with product people, QA, or if we need somebody to quickly ramp up on 3rd party libraries or understand something outside the scope of the team.
This all only applies to small, short term engagements though. Multiyear engagements are their own beast and I always stayed far away. Consulting politics is another layer of hell that most people will want to stay away from.