I have two decades of experience as a consultant (not anymore) in different companies and even different countries and different states and at different levels

I have two decades of experience as a consultant (not anymore) in different companies and even different countries and different states and at different levels in the hierarchy. I would say that getting to work on a "high impact" project is not all that common. It does depend on how you define "high impact" Most of the projects I got on were not green field, it was adding functionality to existing business application, written in legacy ways and legacy languages. I did a lot of figurering out why some obscure program does not work anymore or why it is suddenly so slow. Quite a lot of enterprises does hire in consultants to do sht work so that their internal devs dont have to do it. Of course, some do not have a dev team at all. Some people you end up working with in mid sized to large companies are hostile to consultants being hired in. Had that problem a few times. You do learn how to accommodate unreasonable demands, passive aggressive behavior, how to communicate bad news, lead a group, analyze an existing code base fast. You can fast end up doing a lot of cover your ass, both from a client and from the consultancy company you work with. All the ones I have worked for were cutthroat in some ways. Some more than others. Your billable hours are a huge factor. One coworker of mine was billing upwards of 90h to 150h a week, he got a lot of bonuses and perks. This was not physically possible, but since he had more than one client he billed full it me on several at the same time. IT consultancies are usually highly competitive in all ways. They are also only interested in what you have done this quarter and will sack you if that is not good enough. or have a pay stricture so you dont have a dime if you are not billig at least full time. Several places I worked 40h a week was the bare minimum. Tolerated for a while, but you would get notices about needing to apply yourself more, to get in the game. You are expected to learn all new things in your field on your own time and dime. In some places you have to keep X number of certifications current. You study on your own time but usually the exams are paid for, at least the first try. Failure to keep up is a grave problem. The sales team rules. You have to learn how to kiss their assess and become friends. They will have a lot of pull when it comes to who will be put on a new sale. You want them to think of you as a valuable asset. or you always get the sh*t jobs. I had perhaps 4 - 5 big fun projects. One was to write an ERP system from scratch (Yes I heavily advised the client to buy some existing product but the client was adamant that the business was so unique (it was not) that it had to have its own system. The one big thing they had was a multi-dimensional pricing model from hell. The founder of the company must have spent years coming up with it. All sorts of inputs, all sorts of options discounts, scale, employees, nation, state, order size, Previous orders, season, sports events, stock prices, number and types of cars sold in the last month, and a lot more. Working on that, and getting it to work was probably one of my best achievements. My team was superb.