Even at a small company... the 'good' aspects are in the eye of the beholder, and can change quickly. Some places I've been have been 'good' by department. Pe

Even at a small company... the 'good' aspects are in the eye of the beholder, and can change quickly. Some places I've been have been 'good' by department. People in dept X really ... tolerated things. Pay was decent, but periodic pushes for more 'work' burned out quite a few. But people in dept Y loved their setup. Each dept rated 'the company' relatively differently (not surprising). Another place was... nice. Good... Pleasant. I was on the tech side - around ~20 people in the tech dept (a little bit of networking, some software dev, some testing, some support, etc). We had around a year of everything just humming. Then a new day to day CEO comes in and 8 people left in 8 months. Out of 20... that's a lot. The new CEO was quite damaging (and, I think he knew that he was having a negative effect, and wanted that for reasons that would only benefit him). Suddenly, that company that was 'good' for years got bad real quick. Perhaps the 'good' companies are the ones where some larger culture can endure top leadership/personnel changes? Does that ever happen, or is it an inevitability?