I've been at Link Consulting for almost four years now. In that time I've worked on maritime safety systems, retail backends, public transport ticketing, and whatever the current project turns out to be. Four completely different domains, four different teams, four different codebases. Some people hate that. I kind of like it, I get bored easily.

The Good

Variety. I've touched more systems in four years of consulting than most developers see in ten years at a product company. Each project comes with a new domain, new technical stack (mostly within the JVM ecosystem, at least), and new challenges. I went from scaling ticketing systems in Lisbon and Funchal to building Azure infrastructure with Bicep to migrating from WebLogic services to modern Tomcat for an EU maritime safety agency. That range of experience is hard to get any other way.

You learn to adapt fast. When you join a new project every 12-18 months, you get very good at reading codebases, understanding architectures, and becoming productive quickly. The first week of a new project is always uncomfortable. By the fourth project, you've developed a system for it.

You see what works and what doesn't across multiple organizations. Product developers see one codebase, one set of practices, one team culture. Consultants see dozens. You develop opinions, strong ones, about what actually works in practice versus what just looks good in architecture diagrams.

The Bad

Context switching. Just when you've built deep expertise in a domain, you move on. There's a real cost to never getting to see the long-term impact of your work. You'll feel like a mercenary, hired by the despot in a civil war, and that's not good.

You're always the outsider. No matter how well you integrate, you're the consultant. Some teams welcome you. Some tolerate you. Rarely do you feel like you truly belong to the product team.

Legacy. Consultancies don't get called when everything is working fine. They get called when something is broken, outdated, or needs to be built under pressure. A disproportionate amount of the work involves legacy systems, tight deadlines, and codebases that make you question your career choices.

The Honest Part

Consulting is a trade-off. You get breadth at the cost of depth. You get variety at the cost of ownership. You get a constant stream of new challenges at the cost of never seeing a project through to its full potential.

For where I am in my career, the trade-off works. I'm learning more per year than I would in most product roles. But I can see a future where I want to own something: to build a system from scratch and maintain it for years, to care about it in a way that consulting doesn't really allow.

For now, though? The jungle keeps calling, and I Unga Bunga.