Every engineer should do a stint in consulting
I strongly agree with the title sentimment. Strongly!<p>But, I&#x27;ll add this - work at a company first, full time, for as long as you find it rewarding. Maybe several years at least? ... the longer the better. Bonus for each promotion you receive, primarily b&#x2F;c of different levels of responsibility and leadership that places you in.<p>I think that&#x27;s key to getting the most out of independent consulting, for 2 reasons:<p>First, b&#x2F;c fresh out of college or early in your career, you still don&#x27;t know what you don&#x27;t know. That makes learning w&#x2F;out benefit of teammates, mentors, interactions with other teams (Customer Success, Sales, Marketing, etc.), quite dangerous. Without that wide array of awareness and guidance on a regular basis, it&#x27;s easy to form bad habits. And bad habits attained during one&#x27;s formative years can be long-term or hard to break.<p>And second, b&#x2F;c every engineer needs to experience what it&#x27;s like to maintain and improve a product for years on end. E.g. while I didn&#x27;t recognize it at the time, I believe time I spent with a product for 3 of its generations proved to be one of the best learning environments I&#x27;ve had as a software engineer. That kind of timeline provides first-hand experience to the long-tail of product decision making. It provides long experiential lessons in best practices like automated testing, a structured dev process, engaging in customer feedback, team culture &amp; cohesiveness, etc. And b&#x2F;c I was with the same cohort of employees for so long, and saw how leadership could fluctuate, I also found it helped develop my intuition for effective leaders.<p>All said, I wouldn&#x27;t have gotten as much out of consulting if I wasn&#x27;t backed w&#x2F;prior experience. From an engineering standpoint, I was able to hit the ground running since I already had years of experience developing software. Soft-skills gained during that same time translated directly and immediately to client relationships. I also felt fortunate and well prepared to handle longer-term needs and concerns from bigger clients (Fortune 100&#x2F;500), some of which I still maintain relationships with.