Fun, great work environment was what I also knew when I was a consultant for awhile for a small offshore company.
You just can't get that at the bigs.
It was great, and how I ended up in on the Bakken boom very early. Working a vertical well (which turned out to be an infield discovery because they'd test Hydrocarbon shows instead of blow them off, I saw what I knew another company was looking at in the Bakken in that well. We came back after drilling another well, and twinned the first with their first Bakken horizontal (Elm Coulee Field, in MT). I worked one vertical well after that, and the rest were Bakken and then Three Forks wells for 14 years. We did a lot of experimenting back then, too, and that kept things interesting. Looking for a new ride, now. The Major who bought them out only counted the time I worked for them on my own, and not the 9 years working for another firm, so I got dropped with the rig. A lot of the office folks I had interfaced with retired or moved on, or didn't transition to the major.