There are no guarantees. It's hard to size up a place until you're there a few weeks/months. For example, at my current job, the boss admitted on the intervie

There are no guarantees. It's hard to size up a place until you're there a few weeks/months. For example, at my current job, the boss admitted on the interview that their system was a mess and they wanted to clean it up. But, once I was working there, I'm doing 100% maintenance with no real opportunity to refactor or clean up the old system. Also, after a management change, a good job can turn bad. When my current boss was hired, all the programmers hired by the previous boss quit in the next few months. I had a job turn sour when a coworker was fired. I had double the workload, and the easier tasks my ex-coworker was doing wound up on me. It does get a lot harder as you get older. If a job ad says 2-5 years of experience, then 15 years of experience makes you ineligible. Also due to technology churn, your experience in older languages has a market value of zero (even though it does have real value). I have had jobs that I liked. In one job, most of the team interviewing me seemed awful. The guy I wound up working with was very nice, but he only spoke for me for 2 minutes during the interview. I thought I flunked the interview and it would be an awful job, but it wound up being nice.