I think when we talk about jobs colloquially, we talk about ~2 axes: money and Meaning. We might get more insight into our feelings around work if we considered more axes. Despite its TED-talkiness, I like the Daniel Pink axes of “autonomy, mastery, and purpose” (though I would also add “and money”), but I think that’s still too simple. Here are some axes that I think exist, and can mostly vary independently of each other:

• short-term money. You will make a lot of money this week or month.
• long-term money, or security. You are saving a lot and/or learning useful skills. If you’re just coasting but not learning anything, the job is low on this dimension.
• short-term efficacy. You can look back on a day or an hour and say “I did something.” Even writing dumb little python scripts to fix some minor problem feels good. Conversely, it feels bad if you try to do something all day but are foiled because you don’t know what you’re doing, or your software fails, or bureaucracy.
• long-term efficacy. You can look back on a year or some months and say “I did something.” If you do great work on a project, but the project gets cancelled, your job will be low on this dimension.
• local meaning. You feel like your work is helping your company/organization to do its thing. If you do great work on a project, but you know that the project doesn’t really matter, your job will be low on this dimension.
• global Meaning. You feel like your company doing its thing helps the world. If you work for Doctors Without Borders, or maybe for your favorite political candidate, this is pretty high; if you work for Exxon or Palantir, it’s got to be pretty low.
• local social status. You look respectable to your peers. Nobody (that I know) wants to appear, to their friends, like “the guys on the roof” in Silicon Valley, who collect paychecks but don’t do any work.
• global social status. You look respectable to the public. Professors get paid less than tech workers, but IMO “I’m a professor” gets you more cred than “I’m a software engineer.”
• enjoyability. You like what you do. Like, if time stretched out and you got an extra hour today, to be spent at work, how happy/sad would you be? I think this is related to efficacy, but probably distinct. Low efficacy usually implies low enjoyability, but high efficacy doesn’t necessarily imply high enjoyability. You can probably file papers effectively, but would be bored doing it all day.
• EDIT: good people. Your job brings good people into your life. (where the meaning of “good” is up to you.) This is correlated with enjoyability, but I can see them being separate, especially if your work is pretty solitary.
• EDIT yet again: “Unobtrusiveness” (“The job doesn’t interfere with you living your life”) is definitely one. If you have to work long hours, travel a lot in ways you dislike, or be on call, minus points here.

Hmm, I didn’t mean for so many of these to have a local and a global component, but I guess they almost all do. Money, efficacy, meaning, and social status, in local (or short-term) and global (or long term) versions. Not sure about enjoyability or people; what does “long-term enjoyability/people” mean?

EDIT also: “Appreciation” might be one (“You are appreciated for the work that you do”), but I think it’s more a combination of local meaning, local social status, and good people.

There are probably more dimensions too. This feels like at least a start, though.