I'm not going to lie, this sounds like hell. Places like that make outcasts of anybody who makes the rest "look bad" by "working too hard." It's nice to be valued for your technical skills when you consider the alternative.
I never saw someone become an outcast in the community for working harder or smarter. A given organization might operate like that, but the whole point of a community is that there's more to the world than one organization and one job. I've seen plenty of good people pulled out of bad situations by the community.
Well it is South Florida. I worked with a German software company that for strange reasons opened their US office in Miami. We had a terrible time getting people, although a lot of that was on us. We eventually moved it somewhere else and things were a lot smoother.