Anyone worked in both consulting and finance (hf, pe, etc)? What was more interesting?

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I have done both consulting and PE, PE is way more interesting. Especially if you are in area you are interested in.

You will almost always have ppt/slide ware to produce, regardless of what you do. any management job has that part and that is the only way to present something to your management. On some days it will be just slide ware, on others you get to travel to distant countries to meet a startup or you hangout in NYC or you meet some really cool business partners. For me, it does make up for the boring work. But with the pandemic it really changed. let's hope we'll all be flying again soon.

I was in consulting before PE and thought that consulting was a lot more interesting. However, I only had exposure to growth strategy, market entry, GTM, and DD cases. I often consider going back to consulting.

Hard to say. "Interesting" means different things to different people.

First off, there's a lot of variety in consulting from case-to-case. Strategy case for an extremely visible F50 consumer brand? That's pretty interesting. Post-merger integration project management for a small mining operation in Nevada? Probably less interesting. No 2 paths in consulting are exactly alike. So PE is certainly less variable on a quarter-to-quarter basis. And to a lot of people, variety is interesting.

On the other hand, you definitely get more line of sight into results in PE. You're a lot less likely to spend time making slides for the sake of it and navigating corporate politics vs. doing shit that has a more tangible dollar impact. And to a lot of people, that's more interesting.

I could list more pros and cons for each side, but at the end of the day, different people are going to find different things interesting. Might as well ask what's more interesting, sports or movies? It depends on what you like.