[pmkiwi]

Pretty much my experience as well. I suffered quite a lot from "Be ready to ship crappy products" when the projects were short (it happened quite a lot when I was doing AWS consulting).

I will also add that companies using consultants can be divided in two distinct groups:

1) The companies who know where they are doing and they are using consultants as extra hands/expertise. 2) The companies who expects consultants to (magically) fix their deep problems just because "we pay".

I have worked for both and 1) is definitely more enjoyable (as you can imagne!).