jlazzaro, I did consulting in a former life.
Pros: Get to work with some good customers and some interesting problems
Get to learn customer-facing, diplomacy, business skills
Get to deal with *different* problems every week (ever get that feeling that you're dealing with the *same* problems every day?)
You can make good money
Cons: Get to work with people who are idiots, PITAs, and don't pay their bills, and people who are stupid and cheap and then expect you to magically make everything work
You learn that most people are good, honest, sane people - but not all of them. Some customers are just bad people, or broken.
Other consultants and most consulting companies milk their customers, and you will be encouraged... or strong-armed/back-stabbed... to play the game with them. Don't ever put yourself between a snake and his dinner.
Rewards and incentives are wacky. Your thanks for a good job is often to find people you worked with / helped out get promoted and now they're above you (and often they turn on you after that).
Customers often express that they really like you by trying to hire you. With an offer that's not good enough. And then turning them down generally harms that customer relationship.
Consultants are expendable. Some companies treat consultants poorly, shift blame to consultants to whitewash their own guys, set the consultants up to fail, etc... you can often find yourself a pawn in silly corporate political chess games.
You have to really have a head for money/business, or you can find that you're not making / not taking away nearly as much $$ as you think you are. If you're independent, you need to learn business and accounting/tax stuff. If you're working with an umbrella company, you still need to learn exactly how they do things money-wise to optimize for the best compensation for you. Consulting companies make their profit on the difference between what they bill out and what they pay you... so don't be surprised if they have a lot of tricks to maximize their profit, not yours.
You generally hit a $$ plateau where you're in the high-end game and it gets increasingly hard to get more money. When there's no more growing to be done, then it's time to think about doing something else.
Consulting is a good way to get experience and exposure. It's also a good way to get into IT. It's fun if you're young and don't mind racing around, traveling, etc. Eventually, it wears on you, though. You don't find too many lifers in the IT consulting business.
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