I always break jobs down into four factors:

Knowledge – Am I building skills or knowledge that have value outside this specific company (algorithms, math, systems design, etc.), or am I just learning a bunch of internal trivia that won’t matter anywhere else?

Benefits – Financial compensation and benefits can make up for a surprising amount of dissatisfaction.

People – Do I like the people I work and interact with? Do we get along and have anything in common?

Laudability – Is the work noble, meaningful, or interesting? Highly dependent on the individual. For me, it’s education; for others, it might be science, healthcare, yadda yadda yada.

I'm usually reasonably satisfied if a job meets two out of the four.

    > …a long stint as a founder…

    1. You're expected to work 10 hour days

    2. You're expected to do the jobs of 3 people

    3. You might not get paid on schedule

    …

    >… when people say “culture,” what does that really mean?

I think of an organization's or a team's culture as the undocumented practices that the org or team all follow. Just to name a few…

    1. Interpersonal interaction styles

    2. Communication styles

    3. What's incentivized

    4. What behaviors are acceptable/unacceptable

    …

You could have a "blame culture". Teams like that are incentivized to point the finger and look for convenient scapegoats.

You could have a culture that incentivizes "Psychological safety". Meaning people are allowed to speak up and disagree with stuff without fear of being fired.

You could have a "dysfunctional" culture. One example being where the norm is for individual members to convince other members that they are the smartest person in the room.

    > What actually makes people hate their jobs over time? Is it pay/people/culture?

That's bound to be unique for each person. But it's not unreasonable to guess that _in general_ what ultimately makes people hate their job is…

  • A person and their team value different things

An employee might place a high value on respectfulness. But a coworker can't even spell the word.

Another employee might consider software development as a "craft" and take pride in what they deliver. But the organization/team values "move fast and break things…tech debt be damned!" above everything else.

Culture, in my opinion, is the sum of all behaviors in an organization. Behaviors are driven by incentives and disincentives. When we talk about culture we talk about the behaviors that are generally incentivized and disincentivized. Core values are a way to quickly distill and define the culture of an organization in such a way that it can be discussed and broadly understood.

I've also heard it said that culture is what you let people get away with.

> What actually makes people hate their jobs over time?

This varies widely from person to person.

Someone else in this thread said that a job where they were working 10 hours a day, doing the job of 3 people with missed paychecks would be a cultural no-go for them. For others, the opportunity to learn new things by doing the job of 3 people is a dream. But for most, missed paychecks would be terrible!

I generally believe that (with a few extreme exceptions) that there are not "bad" and "good" cultures. There are just cultures that we do or do not want to be a part of.

The other thing to remember is that people change. A "good" culture for you today is not necessarily going to be a "good" culture for you in 5 years.

Pay - when I am not getting paid as much as I “should”. It’s all relative though. I don’t expect any company outside of BigTech to match BigTech comp (been there done that, not interested in going back).

Any job where I actually go into an office. But the company has to be “remote only”.

Autonomy - for the last decade I have mostly had complete autonomy on the “how” within very wide understandable guardrails when I led projects.

I don’t do side projects and never have during my 30 year career. So the company I work for has to be using marketable up to date tech.

Also I would hate to be on call.

I don’t care about the “mission”. It’s a paycheck.

A really bad colleague can make a job miserable. I slightly bad manager can also make it suck.