- The type of work you do is largely the same across all orgs - unless you're a specialist in some advanced field nobody else can do or you can convince someone in power that you know how to do the occasional cool project
- Both can have long useless meetings. Product orgs' meetings will be crap about how the company is awesome and will make zillions or crap about process-but-not-process-cause-we're-agile; consulting orgs' meetings will be all about having 5 muted engineers on reddit while the client comes up with 3 new requirements per minute
- Product orgs can get by doing way less work, if people lazying around and doing the bare minimum or nothing at all upset you, avoid product focused orgs
- I think you can divide consulting orgs roughly in two groups:
- Doing client work with in-house project management: a nightmare of people trying to squeeze more work out of you until you die
- Giving engineers to organisations: largely like working in a product org
- Consulting orgs have the advantage of rotating clients more often, which means you'll have to deal with horrible people for a shorter amount of time (unless the horrible people are inside your consulting org). In product orgs you'll have to deal with them until they leave for somewhere else
- Consulting on your own is definitely more work & more money but, more importantly, reduces the risk of running into horrible people