Agreed. At this point, I view anyone who worked for more than six months at any of the big IT consulting companies - and especially accounting firms pretending to be IT consulting companies - with deep suspicion.
I've literally witnessed teams where a single contractor out-performed a team of twenty people by a factor of 10 because they were reasonably competent. I guess this is where the myth of the 10x programmer comes from!
Using a throwaway here, but I stayed at Accenture for much too long (years). I ended up moving to a household-name tech company and never looked back. This move was not intentional. Despite having glowing performance reviews as an hands-on engineer, my business group felt my skills were mismatched. And they were - they wanted specific certified consultants in the business group and my expertise was building general cloud-native systems.
The very unfortunate thing is most of my ex-colleagues have climbed the ladder to a point with no perceived way down or up. They think they are “managers” and believe they are equivalent to one in tech, but no tech company wants some 7+ year tenure Accenture “manager” managing their engineering teams when all they’ve done is sent out product specs to an offshore team. Even if that offshore team is awful, they’re still doing the hard work of architecting and creating the code. The onshore “manager” is just a face for the team.
Some are genuinely good at their job, but they’ll need to transition to non-tech F500 companies to do anything with a similar prestige to what they’re doing now.
Making a "career" at one of these dead-end IT consulting firms is a real danger every tech person should be aware of.
I mean, if you don't get fired, make a nice salary, and you don't care about actually doing interesting work with technology, then I suppose it's not that bad.
If you try to change jobs, especially if you decide you wanted to actually learn real tech, it's a real burden.
I've literally witnessed teams where a single contractor out-performed a team of twenty people by a factor of 10 because they were reasonably competent. I guess this is where the myth of the 10x programmer comes from!