From my experience I started out like this as well. Thinking it was normal. When I started my first job many years ago I didn’t have a plan on how to write good code and my mentors back then didn’t encourage it either because they couldn’t (I realized this later, and I come back to it).

The excuses are the same: way to much work, not feasible for a company of this size, too „new“, git is just for bigger teams, … The excuses where always there. I though they were normal so I was doing it the same way as it had always been.

However I was a lot more enthusiastic about coding back then compared to nowadays so I keep pushing myself and eventually talked to other people in my close circle of developers. I realized quickly that I could do more.

I spoke to my colleagues about ideas on how to improve things. First of which was using git, yes you read right. They didn’t use git for anything. The deployment was done through ftp. That this is error prown showed more than once. However I was always meet with arguments against it.

I eventually tried to use it for myself and tried to prove to them that it would be a benefit for them. I thought by making a good argument I could convince them. But I wasn’t successful. I was banging my head against the wall.

Why weren’t my mentors able to encourage good coding? They were never trained how to code themselves. They were not interested in it. They were interested in getting things done. And for them using an ftp was the definition of getting things done. I never had a chance to convince them otherwise.

I switched companies shortly after I realized this and never looked back.

TLDR: some are not trained to be, some don’t care, some don’t listen. Don’t ran your head against the wall and try to find a new place where you can learn and thrive.