I feel exactly the same and would wager that some of the ultra-negative comments here are either the result of extreme examples of bad work (every company will deliver bad work at times) or they have been personally affected by the consequences of hiring strategic consulting firms, so they are the enemy from this point forward.
I used to work for Big 3 as well, in technology consulting (way way way before switching to become an actual dev somewhere else), so our analyses were targeted more towards offering a client a perspective on his technological standing compared to the rest of the industry. It was at a time were _the majority_ of European companies exhibited extreme skepticism towards public cloud infrastructure, for example, and putting laws, economic numbers, competitors and all that into perspective for a client can certainly be very valuable to drive some change.
For Big 3 however, I had a feeling that consultancy offerings were always a way to get the foot in the door to win clients for the accounting teams - who were pretty toxic about being the only "real" Big 3 employees and everyone else is inferior.
I used to work for Big 3 as well, in technology consulting (way way way before switching to become an actual dev somewhere else), so our analyses were targeted more towards offering a client a perspective on his technological standing compared to the rest of the industry. It was at a time were _the majority_ of European companies exhibited extreme skepticism towards public cloud infrastructure, for example, and putting laws, economic numbers, competitors and all that into perspective for a client can certainly be very valuable to drive some change.
For Big 3 however, I had a feeling that consultancy offerings were always a way to get the foot in the door to win clients for the accounting teams - who were pretty toxic about being the only "real" Big 3 employees and everyone else is inferior.