The way you describe it they are the worst sort of consultants. I once worked on a project that a big 5 consulting firm was charging 1.7 million to deliver. After 6 months, a tech savvy guy convinced the CEO to hire me for 3 months to sort everything out. I came in, had systems up and running partially (but delivering useful results) in 2 weeks. Then I spent the rest of the 3 months delivering every deliverable that the big 5 firm was behind on. The customer refused to pay the big 5 firm's bills and took them to court to recover money already paid out. The big 5 firm settled out of court by returning all money previously paid plus 90,000 for my bill. It was one of those secret settlements which is why I am fuzzy on the details, but when I mentioned it to other people in the software development business, the stories poured out.
Note how Ben Horowitz did not just farm out the decisions to a prestigious consulting firm but gave it to a guy that he knew and who he had carefully checked out in order to know that he was trustworthy.
I once went into a project where the runtime for a complex financial calculation (as complex as it can be) was 8 to 10 hers. In 2 weeks it was 37 seconds and working perfectly. When the CFO took me for dinner, I told him that 90% of the work was the old implementation, which set the right concepts, and I merely did an optimisation. Many times, the first take is not optimal, but I always try to appreciate the input I get even from suboptimal implementations.
Note how Ben Horowitz did not just farm out the decisions to a prestigious consulting firm but gave it to a guy that he knew and who he had carefully checked out in order to know that he was trustworthy.