Tech skills are like retirement funds: compound interest is your friend. A dollar invested now, at the beginning of your career, is worth more than a dollar invested later on.

Right now, you want to be pushing to gain skill as quickly as possible. The skills and habits you develop now will pay back tenfold later on. This probably means being surrounded by developers smarter than you, sooner rather than later.

I'm not a TDD "fanatic" or whatever that even means, but some amount of automated testing is a sensible form of risk management. If you're being actively discouraged from pursuing it, you're the smartest guy in the room.

That means it's time to move on.