Consulting is a completely respectable career full of brilliant people that make great money, get to travel the country, receive immense business experience, and help plenty of companies out of pretty sticky situations. It's just a career path that doesn't excite me at all.
I have always been a very creative-oriented person. Whether that was building HTML websites or filming and editing short videos or making logos in Photoshop or recording music in Logic Pro, I have always been driven by the prospect of creating really cool things. Likewise, when I think about what excites me most about a career, it's the chance to have a hand in developing, launching, or managing more really cool things. I'm a product person, and just like I lean on my favorite products to capture my creativity, I want to lean on this creativity to help grow really inspiring products.
In consulting, I feel like the product. I feel like I'm what is being bought and sold, and that's pretty much exactly what's happening. The product is my commodified knowledge. That doesn't quench any creative thirst I have. It just leaves me thirsty in a tailored suit at 4 am in O'Hare Airport every Monday morning.
The business model itself also feels somewhat twisted. In summary: you pay tens of thousands of dollars to attend a prestigious four-year university; you sign on with a consulting firm that swoops in on Career Fair day with lucrative offers to gobble up all the high-achieving students; this firm then leases you back to other companies and charges them some amount greater than your salary for the right to temporarily use you. Consulting firms just feel like middlemen to me.
To reiterate: there is nothing wrong with a good middleman, and I mean absolutely no judgement towards people who pursue this career path and are excited by the prospect of working with these clients. I also 100% see the value in hiring a consulting firm to tackle short-term, one-off problems or to get an outside perspective on a longstanding issue. Once again, though, the business model just doesn't excite me at all. I know these firms will talk for hours during a nicely catered info session about how their unique culture makes analysts more prepared to best address client issues and how their secret internal database of company knowledge is unparalleled in the industry and how one October the entire company went to Fiji together and it was amazing. But the business model remains the same.
I don't want to have a middleman dictating what work I do. I want to get my boots on the ground somewhere and get them dirty. Best of luck to everyone in consulting. But I can't say I'm particularly envious.
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