Another pro for consultancy work: you can chose contracts that that don't require you to be on call for production problems so this isn't forced upon you. I'm

Another pro for consultancy work: you can chose contracts that that don't require you to be on call for production problems so this isn't forced upon you. I'm not saying you wouldn't learn from working on production, but whether it's worth the stress is another question. In terms of software development, it's hard to think of a worse feeling than when you do a production deploy, you hit refresh on the website or whatever it is, and it shows a fatal error, then there's a mad scramble to roll back the change and figure out quickly what went wrong before the consequences grow too great. Most of the time bosses + coworkers aren't that understanding about it either and get into finger-pointing.