I found a pattern in myself. When work is going well, I do not talk about work. I talk about a bad joke, what someone cooked, how a Guinness pint tastes in different pubs, the thing someone said in the kitchen. When work is going badly, the work is all I talk about.
What is work anyway? It is a bunch of people communicating with each other to produce something and move it forward. The technical problem is only part of it. Nevertheless, most of your experience comes from the conversations, disagreements, questions, and small interactions around that problem.
When I ask people about their best jobs, they name ones where the codebase was bad, the product was a piece of crap, or the company was going nowhere. The work itself was not exceptional but they just liked the people they were doing it with.
Worst tech stack, best crew
Liking Is Not Portable
When you start a job, you enter into a lot of unknowns, and often you know very little. Some companies do not even let you interview with your potential peers or manager. I do not like that. You work with people. You need to see whether you like them.
Liking is a weird thing, though. The same people in a different environment might not like each other. Pressure, incentives, leadership, and the work itself change how people behave. You are not only choosing people but also the conditions under which you will interact with them every day. I worked with the same colleague at two companies. In the first, we attacked all problems together. In the second, he mostly told me what was wrong with mine. He had not changed. The company had.
One thing that might not be apparent is that you do not work with that many people at once. The number of people you regularly work with is probably around ten to fifteen. Of those, you are likely close to only two to five. That is why the people matter. You repeatedly interact with the same small group.
Nothing Has to Be Obviously Wrong
Everyone can be polite and competent. There does not need to be bullying, shouting, or some terrible manager. You can still spend fifteen minutes rewriting a simple message because you are worried about how it will be received. You can spend hours solving something alone because asking someone feels harder than the technical problem.
Often, your first sign is that you begin reducing contact. You delay messages, avoid office days, stay silent in meetings, and feel relieved when one is cancelled. You call it focus time or meeting fatigue, but perhaps you just do not want to talk to these people. The work might feel alright. Your group might even look fine from the outside. Yet, every interaction still feels like another internal battle.
They Do Not Need to Become Your Friends
If those interactions are a chore, if you cannot joke, make fun of each other, share the pain, or be blunt, I do not know, man. That is probably not worth your time. This does not mean everyone has to become your friend. You do not need to spend weekends together or pretend the company is a family. You need to be able to ask a badly formed question without preparing a defence. You need to disagree without spending the afternoon repairing the relationship.
Difficult work can still be enjoyable with people you like working with. An incident can be stressful without becoming miserable. A bad codebase can still produce some of the best years of your career when people solve it together, help without turning everything into a favour, and can laugh when things go wrong.
The opposite is also true. Interesting work becomes exhausting when every conversation needs preparation. You stop sharing unfinished ideas. You ask for help later. You keep more problems to yourself because collaboration feels more expensive than working alone. At that point, the people have become part of the work you are trying to get through.
There is another side to this. A team you like can keep you in an underpaid or stagnant job for too long. Companies can also use loyalty and friendship to ask for more than they should. You still need boundaries. Your colleagues do not need to become your entire social life. But keeping work transactional does not mean accepting social misery. You can protect your time and still want mutual respect, natural humour, and easy communication.
What We Cannot Compare
We all have to make a living. Salary matters. Sometimes you cannot leave, and sometimes taking less money is not realistic. The problem is that salary, title, technology, company name, and remote policy are visible before you join. How much energy an ordinary conversation will cost you is not.
That is why people often understand the value of a good team only after leaving it. They take the better title, the larger salary, or the more prestigious company, then discover that they miss the ordinary ease of their previous job. They do not miss the work. They miss how it felt to do the work with those people.
We compare jobs through what can be written in an offer. We live them through what repeats every day.
So when you can choose, weigh the part that is not in the offer. And when you cannot choose yet, at least stop treating a good team as the cheapest thing to trade away. Horrible places will make your life shorter. When you get home, you need time to clean the day off yourself before you can return to the rest of your life. It is not worth it.