Originally Posted by Dude
In IT, "consulting" just means "I don't work permanently for the organization I'm currently working for." In some situations, it's just white-collar jargon for "temp agency." In other situations, you're paying for well-developed and/or specialized expertise. It depends on the firm, mostly.

And sometimes you think you're hiring well-developed, specialized expertise from a highly-reputable company, only to find out the person hasn't got a clue.

Sometimes you even find that one of the many consultants working on a major project submitted a timesheet for 21 full work days, in a month with only 20 work days, and the logs indicate he never logged on.

Yes.

This.

Kcab, I don't think it's a huge regional difference so much as maybe that I'm thinking of what I'm most familiar with (not being in computer science/IT or in an strict engineering field like EE or ME) and not with big-firm consulting.

Independent consulting is a different thing entirely-- and that tends to be the rule in some domains within STEM, but mostly not the case in IT or engineering (outside of specialty disciplines).

DH has done some consulting work on the side, and so have I. No way would either of us have been competent to be acting in that capacity as a newly-burnished B.S. however.

I think that it is safe to assume that recent graduates are referring to the sweatshop labor pool variety, or the expertise-rich temp-agency variety of "consulting."

I certainly hope that there aren't actually 16% of them thinking that they'd make expert independent consultants.

Schrödinger's cat walks into a bar. And doesn't.