And it's VERY difficult for me to get anything that costs money approved regardless of price
For me, this is a big red flag.
For me, this is a big red flag.
The response I get is we don't _NEED_ a CI/CD (and haven't had one for years), so they would rather I find a solution that can run on our hardware for free.
I'll add that I enjoy my work environment and they treat me very well, I'm young and I'm known to "like shiny new things". I also have to work on how I pitch why we need certain things, again I'm pretty young so I'm not well practiced in that just yet.
You are not making this sound like less of a red flag!
But yeah, if you are both new and young there, you can't just push hard for all the things you want. But in this case... you're right, heh.
If I were you, I'd be keeping my eyes out for job opportunities in environments where you can actually learn something about good modern software engineering practices form their example. (Easier said then done, don't I know it).
I was in your boots some time ago, managing CI before I convinced the company that paying for a hosted CI is cheaper than me maintaining our self-hosted whatever CI we were trying at that point :) Jenkins was atrocious and I spent ungodly amount of time dealing with all kinds of issues, while TeamCity was mostly configure-and-forget. Initial setup is pretty straightforward, so is later migration to a real database for example. Updates are seamless and we had some projects on it even after we started using paid CI (Bitrise), because there was no motivation to migrate as everything was running smoothly.