You are probably thinking of "consultants" and not consultants. Consultants comes in, fixes a problem, maybe educate employees about the problem and then leave.

You are probably thinking of "consultants" and not consultants. Consultants comes in, fixes a problem, maybe educate employees about the problem and then leave. Take management consultants, their main job is mostly to go in and fix other managers messes and possible educate them so it wont happen again or get them replaced. Software consultants can often have very similar roles, a company have a problem with producing software, they take in a consultant to fix the issue because they themselves don't know how, the consultant comes in and fixes the issue and in the best case educates your workers so they can handle these issues themselves in the future. This is what a company typically wants when they hire a consultant to fix a problem, not a person who only solves already well defined problems. Example: You have a new cloud based solution but prod is often broken, you hire a consultant to flesh out your deployment strategy to make it more robust, he comes in, creates a basic deployment strategy and shows your team how it works and how to add more tests to it, then he leaves. Production failures go down and your team is now stronger as a result. This is an ideal software consultant. Of course you also have "consultants" who are just normal employees with less legal rights, those are more like what you are talking about.