- People regularly take vacation time.
- They're happy to hear that you care about work/life balance and will not work more than 40 hours a week except in emergencies.
- You're not strongly invested in whether the company experiences long-term success.
- They have a moderately refined change control process (e.g. Scrum, but anything works as long as it collects all the work in one place to be prioritized and scheduled).
- You don't have to go on-call. (For many, this can be quite stressful.)
The first company I ever worked for was a sorta family business. The owner was also the CEO and was very responsive to the needs of employees. He would throw parties in their manor, and everyone knew each other well and there was much less rivalry/competition to climb the proverbial ladder. Very true about working for people who're married with kids; this gave the owner, and the company, a kind of professionalism that has served me well in my own career. They were really kind-hearted people, until it came time to make some serious decisions about the future of the company.
Often times family businesses are unwilling to sell or dilute their equity since their identity is so tied to the company. This became a huge deal when there were talks of taking the company public, accepting outside investment etc.