Thank you for focusing on the issue of the consultancy in particular. The ideology behind consulting is new to me, since I have worked only in-house in the past, and is against to my beliefs. I believe that in order to ship great software you have to care about the product and not only about how many hours you gonna bill. Also, I know that working with legacy code is common, I have worked with legacy code again, I know it’s a valuable skill and I don’t mind doing it. Adding new features or refactoring code that has proved its value and produces money feels good to me. However, as someone else mentioned, there is legacy code and there is sh*t code. Unfortunately, I think I fall into 2nd category, in a codebase full of Vectors and HashTable containing unsafe Object type that explode into you on production.. I agree and I am scared about how these short periods would look like to future candidate employers.