Ask HN: What's it like working for typical consulting companies?

I've worked for both types of companies, and I prefer product companies. But that's possibly a matter of preference.

Consulting is more dynamic and you're exposed to many different projects and probably to many different technologies. I had a good time doing it, but it was for a very good company which is remembered by all former employees: DEC (Digital Equipment Corp.) DEC was acquired by Compaq, which in turn was acquired by HP.

You need to travel and your work place and team is constantly changing, as you work at the client's office usually and teams are determined by availability and budget. If you work for a big consulting firm, chances are that once you leave a project you won't come back to it, and that can lead to solutions that work in the short term to meet the project deadlines, but are otherwise bad solutions for the long term.

Practices can vary greatly among different consulting firms, some will treat you well, others will simply sell warm bodies as you point out.

Working for a product company means having less or no travel at all, and a stable team to work with. It means also having much better care for quality and long term planning, because you or your colleagues will also be taking care of bug fixing and new features.

You're in touch with the business and the day to day customer issues and needs, which brings a greater understanding of the system you're working on.

However, the technology stack will be less diverse for obvious reasons.

Culture fit is also much more important as your team is not likely to change for a few years.

> I see some medium and large ones around (like Accenture) and I wonder if they can have good environments or if they quickly turn into "renting expensive warm bodies" shops only pressuring for filling up time-sheets and so on.

I worked with a bunch of contractors on an enterprise software project, one of my colleagues was from Accenture, he was actually pretty good at what he did, he gained a lot of marketable experience (AWS, automated deployment etc) on the gig by working long hours for months and learning from other experienced people in other teams. He didn't get any support from Accenture - they weren't interested in training him in any modern technical stuff that he wanted to learn. They would have been taking a hefty profit atop his daily rate. He was able to cash this in by getting a job with a smaller consultancy specialising in cloud services (better pay, better culture, more opportunities for learning and specialisation). So that's one example of how to use a bad professional services org job as a stepping stone to a better job in a more specialised professional services org, if you're willing to work hard for a year or two and have a bit of luck in terms of the project you get allocated.

I think some of the consulting companies work a bit like cults: get useful but naive young people on board who haven't experienced a sane working culture or figured out how to put boundaries in place between their life and their work, and bill them out for 80 hour weeks.

If you have a specialisation and can find work with a smaller consulting / professional services company that matches that specialisation, you might have a much more agreeable time.

@ncerezo -- your comment is thoughtful and adds to the discussion, unfortunately it is only visible to users with "showdead" on. so it goes.

Really demanding clients, no glory for anything you do, people being thrown under the bus, lots of travel, some greenfield projects with tight deadlines, sometimes made to fix a project half finished.

I started my career from one of such consulting companies. I was naive back then. I thought I am a developer/engineer and this is how software industry is. Now, I actively avoid them. The culture in these companies is horrible. I would rather prefer to work for a small innovative company than working for these body shops.