Same here. I'm also a contractor and have seen scores of different work environments. Maybe hundreds. I also specialize in making tech teams happier and more pr

Same here. I'm also a contractor and have seen scores of different work environments. Maybe hundreds. I also specialize in making tech teams happier and more productive, so how people feel about their work is something I've been tracking and learning about for a while. "Stress" is a weird word. I've seen people with jobs I thought were skate that were totally stressed-out. I've also seen people with jobs I'd never take who thrive. Maybe discomfort is a better word. From what I've seen, all jobs involve some amount of discomfort. The critical factor is whether or not you feel in control over it. I was on a short gig with a client a few years back where I was hired by the QA department. They were having problems with quality, but it really was about trust, attitude, stress (discomfort), and interpersonal relationships. I was only there for a few weeks, but I never had a week with that client where they didn't complain about something. I wore jeans, which broke the dress code. Jeans were common all over the company, but for some reason this particular group cared about a dress code. I left an hour early because there was nothing to do and I didn't want to waste their time. They wanted me there until 5 every day. It was seven or eight things like that over a few weeks. They were probably one of my top five worst clients ever. It was sad because when I worked with the dev teams there was this feeling of helplessness. It wasn't that things sucked. Things suck all the time. It was that they didn't feel like they had control over it. Instead it was just random sucky stuff showing up and everybody having to react. All the time. It destroyed trust and made things miserable. People ended up in little cliques, controlling information flow and making sure somebody else got blamed for things. I pointed out that there were some severe environment issues that we needed to fix right away. Then I was corrected and told that they only wanted 1 or 2 tech topics from me, not advice on making a better work environment. I was happy to leave. That unpredictable, out-of-control, low-trust-environment is what destroys lives. (and team productivity). All of those adjectives are relative, however, and I've never seen a case where things couldn't get better. If people want things to get better.