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I would be somewhat more charitable and claim that they do some "fit the client problem to an existing in-house problem solving models" exercises as well.

I disagree. Having spent 6 years working in one, my tasks ranged from spreadsheets and decks to coding java, dev ops, all forms of testing and plenty of technical design work. It's hard to lump entire big consulting companies into one category as once you get to 100K+ employees the company is like an entire world within itself. I agree that in general, the consulting arms of said companies do not do complex technical work. When you are integrating and upgrading a SAP implementation with 70+ existing systems, across 6 continents, with hundreds of stakeholders, things get complex.

This makes me wonder why they're asking one guy to do the work of two or three people. If it's really that simple, and doesn't require specialized skills, there are plenty of archaeology and anthropolgy grads out there, realizing they made a mistake in choosing a major, who would love a job crunching numbers on Wall St. Why not hire more?