How to survive a toxic workplace and how to avoid creating one

As an immigrant in Sweden, this is one of the instances where I'd love a name-and-shame (but it's just wishful thinking, I don't expect or really want you public shaming companies). Simply because I've heard this happening to other colleagues, in different companies, and for some Swedes this sounds almost fabricated.

I didn't get that clear message about not raising salaries up to Swedish colleagues but I noticed at some point that I was severely underpaid given my experience and skills, even more after a couple of years and I started to hear from much more junior employees how much they were making.

I've worked in teams with absolutely no superstar, just very decent engineers that cared about delivery, the customer and code quality. We achieve a lot in very short time, very little friction, everyone respected everyone and, more than that, trusted each other to be doing their best on their parts. We communicated well, we had really good pairing and mob programming sessions and we discovered, defined and delivered a product together.

On the other hand I've worked in a few places with the kind of developer that could be considered the mythical "10x engineer", they could really deliver a lot by themselves but had no sense of team spirit, poor communication and availability to help others. Found parts of the process boring and would refuse to participate. Not extremely toxic but definitely not part of the "whole" and after a year or two of this they are much more of a drag to any product than an asset.

Once I worked with probably the smartest guy I've ever worked, who really cared about lifting others around him so he could work, in his words, for "his own obsolescence" in every project. He helped a whole company improve processes, ways of working and code quality, I do think that his contributions alone made the company at least twice as valuable after a year. And he didn't really care about that, he wanted to see people working happily, with as less obstacles as possible, and together. I miss him a lot.

First couple days were not that bad. Not particularly good, but nothing too bad. Like people weren't too friendly but neither too hostile.

There was, though, some casual heated discussion here and there. As I met some people more closely I began to see a trend: Everybody hated almost everybody else. One developer openly told me in our first conversation something like "You'll notice few people talk to me... Everyone hates me here.". Then somewhere else some shouting erupted for a few minutes, but nobody seemed to pay too much attention to it.

I saw someone get up from their desk, go to someone else and instead of normally asking whatever question they wanted to ask, start shouting their question. "How can it be that something something?!!! This is totally unacceptable!". Nobody even looked up from their screens or anything. It would turn out that was the way they always communicated.

We got a meeting with the whole team. Ah, no, not the whole team, just half of it. Why? - I asked. "Oh, we tried that but we can't have the whole team in one meeting because there are... conflicts and we end up not doing anything productive."

A few days later, I get called into a meeting with 6 other people, just to generally estimate a few tasks and discuss some of their details. After about two minutes or so, two people are arguing which ones are the tasks that we need to discuss. Things escalate and they are shouting while the rest watches calmly. I don't even know what to do or where to look because none seems to react at all to this. After some 15-20 minutes of this, the meeting is cancelled. People just stand up and return to their desks. I ask one of them if this is normal. "Yeah, pretty much."

I tried really hard and stayed there for more than 1 1/2 years. The only thing I have from all that is a lot of awful anecdotes about awful people.