Great teams should be visible because they produce great products or services, and because they have their pick of top people because word gets around.

Big companies will have multiple teams, maybe hundreds at companies like Google and Apple. Some of those may be great to work with, others dysfunctional. Adding more people can push the “greatness” in any direction because interpersonal factors are first-order drivers of team productivity and job satisfaction.

So it’s not impossible to identify candidate teams but I think it is impossible to predict how you might fit and what you can get out of it.

I think word of mouth through referrals and contacts works best. Some companies have reputations for building good teams, others are known for dysfunction, but those generalization don’t necessarily predict what an individual will experience. Even Google has unhappy employees.