Yeaaaah, I have never once heard anyone use the word "consultant" to mean the latter.

When a major company "brings in consultants" they generally mean exactly calling up one of the major consulting firms and bringing in a bunch of outsourced short-term people (those "hired hands") and not e.g. freelance experts; and while these "hired hands" contractors are quite different in practice from "proper consultants" as the article describes, they usually are advertised as the same thing.

Then maybe you should do a stint in consulting -- you'll learn something new every day!

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28549676

I have. That's why I stopped doing it.

Clearly multiple people in this thread and the original article itself. Maybe you’re looking in the wrong places?

I've spoken to multiple consultancies to try and figure out if the career path would work out for me.

All of them made it clear that their MO is to provide asses in seats to build software quickly, then hand it over to the customer to whatever they liked with it - generally hire a bunch of outsourced developers to keep it barely alive, maybe add a feature or two per year.

Now TBF this is Switzerland, where salaries are always very high, but employee stock options etc. are pretty much unknown (outside of Google). Generally that means that companies are already spending shitloads of cash on software developers, so they might as well hire them as employees, not contractors.

Same, having been a consultant for 10 years.

By "serial hired hand" I think the article is taking about someone who is technically a contractor but gets repeatedly contacted by the same company for the same project over a period of years. They end with (almost) the same level code ownership as a regular employee. That's not what the parent comment was taking about.