Basically, large consulting companies are just a box of chocolates/ My first 14 years out of college was working for an IT consulting company that initially co

Basically, large consulting companies are just a box of chocolates/ My first 14 years out of college was working for an IT consulting company that initially competed in same space with Anderson/Accenture, but later pivoted. Many people in my class in college went to Accenture after graduation, though few stayed more than a couple of years. It was seen as a resume starter before going back to MBA or other graduate programs. In my experience in similar realm, we had some good clients and some challenging clients. We provided good design/implementation resources on some projects and people fresh out of college (local and remote) with no practical experience on other project. Often, large consulting companies can only provide people that are available, not the best people for the job. Whether I or other team members were the best developers for any given project was easily debatable. However, almost everyone I worked with put in the effort to learn and deliver the project for the client. Consultants are brought in for many reasons and for different phases of projects. Some of those phases only result in PowerPoint and other "simple" deliverables. Some phases deliver tangible value. In most cases though, consultants are brought in due to businesses not having internal expertise or having failed internally to deliver already.