Steve Jobs on Consulting at MIT

"How many of you are from consulting? Oh that's bad. You should do something.

No seriously, I don't think there anything inherently evil in consulting, I think that without owning something over an extended period of time, like a few years, where one has a chance to take responsibility for one's recommendations, where one has to see one's recommendations through all action states and accumulate scare tissue for the mistakes and to picks oneself up off the ground and dust oneself off, one learns a fraction of what one can.

Coming in and making recommendations and not owning the results, not owning the implementation, I think is a fraction of the value and a fraction of the opportunity to learn and get better.

You do get a broad cut at companies but it's very thin, it's like a picture of a banana, you might get a very accurate picture but its only 2 dimensional, and without the experience of actually doing it you never get 3 dimensional, so you might have a lot of pictures on your walls, you can show it off to your friends, I've worked in bananas, I've worked in peaches, I've worked in grapes, but you never really taste it, that is what I think.

You're also a variable expense and in hard times you find yourself..."