A recent commentary at CNNMoney.com was titled “Signs you have a great job … or not,” and included a list of questions to help employees figure out where they stand.

For example: Do I know what’s expected of me at work? At work, do my opinions seem to count? Do I have a best friend at work? And so forth.

The questions actually come from a book that has been around for a few years, “First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently” by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman. They’re good questions, without question. But maybe you prefer specific examples:

If your human resources person suddenly appears at your desk with empty boxes, drops them at your feet and says, “Just so you know, I tried to stick up for you,” that’s a bad sign.

If the company gives you a corner office with a view, that’s a good sign. Unless it’s on the ground floor, and the view is of the dumpster. And there’s a funny smell.

If your supervisor selects you to represent the organization at a conference in Paris, that has to be a good sign.

If you’re unanimously chosen by your colleagues to represent them in the annual stair climb competition at 801 Grand — and you just got back to work after heart surgery – that’s borderline at best.

The researchers picked 12 key questions after studying the results of 1 million employee responses to Gallup polls over the years. Asked recently how many companies pass the test, Coffman estimated the rate at 15 percent.

Which seems to leave a little room for improvement.

Still, in most cases it’s not the company, but the immediate manager who drives employees out the door screaming. Coffman said 70 percent of resignations are triggered by the manager, not the job.

Sometimes someone will quit for reasons that are almost impossible to understand from anywhere outside that person’s cranium. Once upon a time in Des Moines, there was a man who made his living flying the company airplane and shooting photographs at the same time. This is what is known as a dream job.

He resigned to go into the insurance business. No offense to the insurance business, but come on. Solo aviation versus the latest combined ratio numbers? Not even close.

OK, that choice probably was made for financial reasons, but satisfaction with pay and benefits didn’t even make Buckingham and Coffman’s list. Something about the need for decent pay being a given, not a variable with shades of gray.

In other words, if you really like your job, maybe you shouldn’t jump ship just to make a few more bucks in a new place filled with a fresh assortment of malcontents and backstabbers. You might miss the old, familiar malcontents and backstabbers more than you think.

According to the questions, if you have the materials and equipment you need to do the job, if you have the opportunity to do what you do best, if someone at work encourages your development, and so on, you should allow yourself to just settle back and enjoy the ride.

Now, one last example, offered in memory of The Des Moines Register’s Rob Borsellino, who filed his last column much too soon:

Rob was my boss when my kids came to visit the Register newsroom one day at a tender age. Wide-eyed and excited, they were greeted in the careful, kindly Iowa fashion by one person after another. Then we entered the Bronx world of Borsellino. “So,” he said to my innocent little tykes, “is your dad as lazy at home as he is here at work?”

In retrospect, that might have been a bad sign.