Consultants, real consultants, are supposed to be a little bit of everything. A tiny bit accountant, a dash of project manager, a tad of a kindergarten teacher, and a small amount programmer...
Now real consultants who do IT jobs tend to do things in a typical way. They exhibit these little behaviours that are at the very least peculiar to IT specialists. Sometimes it works out okay, other times it's a source of frustration, both for clients and for techies.
1. If it can go wrong, it deserves to be caught.
Exhibited in: code with huge amounts of if-statements or exception handling. Better yet: nested if-statements. Consultants are careful, therefore all situations need to be identified, handled and taken care of. The upside of this is that a consultant can always point out to the client "I took care of that, there: it says so in the code." The downside is that debugging is a losing proposition, as techies wade through a jungle of code.
2. Job done... in a single unit of code.
Exhibited in: huge, huge amounts of code (1000s of lines), that perform one business requirement from top to bottom, without stopping. The upside: consultants show they understand the client's needs, because they did everything in a single run. The downside: lots and lots of code to support. Good luck if you need to find something, let alone change something.
More next time.
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