Like people see consulting on there and assume you're not skilled because they had some bad experiences with consultants?

At least in my case, the quality of my work as a consultant is no worse than any work I've done in industry (and almost certainly better, as I got exposed to more modern practices and worked with a wider variety of people), and I had industry jobs for like 16 years before this job.

My client also requires code reviews with engineers that work for the company internally (technically just other people on the team, but there's a couple internal people on the team that usually do the reviewing), so pretty much everything I write gets internal approval before it gets merged into the codebase.

If I got questioned about that in the interview, I could just tell them that.

Also because my firm is smaller they might not realize it's a consulting firm to begin with just from the name on the resume. It isn't something easily recognizable like Deloitte or Accenture.

This does sometime become a red flag for some companies. Deserved or not, some people will view people with a lot of consulting experience with suspicion if they're a product company. The reasoning is that consulting groups tend to not have skin in the game. They can come in, write a bunch of crap, and then walk away leaving the mess for some future person to deal with. Thus the concern is that the ex-consultant will not have developed good habits in terms of maintainability of code, dealing with production issues, etc.

It's definitely true for some people I've met, but it's definitely *not* true for others I've met. But if you're interviewing, how does the potential employer know which you are?

I guess so? I'm on about 12 years experience and I've had 2 interviews where they explicitly mentioned that they want people who worked for a product company. I've started tinkering with hiding the fact I'm a consultant and just listing the projects I've done (which I'm proud of) as companies but of course that would fall apart if they did any calling. All clients I've been on have loved me and would gladly give me a good reference but they couldn't claim I was employed there. lol.

I really appreciate my consulting experience just from the sheer diversity of cloud environments and languages I've had to deal with but who knows!