I think the whole concept of testing confuses a lot of people. I know I was (and still sometimes am) confused about the various "best practices" and opinions around testing. As as well as how/what/when to test.

For my projects, I mainly want to Get Shit Done. So I write tests for the major functional areas of the business logic, mainly because I want to know ASAP when I accidentally break something important. When a bug is found that a test didn't catch, that's usually an indicator that I forgot a test, or need to beef up that area of functional testing.

I do not bother with TDD, or tests that would only catch cosmetic issues, and I avoid writing tests that only actually test some major dependency (like an ORM).

If the organization you are in does not value testing, you are probably not going to change their mind. But if you have the freedom to write worthwhile tests for your contributions to the code, doing so will probably make you a better developer.

Yes

I worked for a company that had no tests.

I worked on the core software, new employee, the programmer who wrote the software gone...

Regularly released new features and found out, some days later, that I'd broken some peripheral, but important, business logic.

Drove me mad! I was not allowed to write tests, it was "unproductive"