Near the start of my career I was at a small/medium sized company on a tiny engineering team (3.5 people). We also had a lot of responsibility. Naturally we did

Near the start of my career I was at a small/medium sized company on a tiny engineering team (3.5 people). We also had a lot of responsibility. Naturally we did the only thing we could and formed silos and worked in our individual silos without too much regard for testing or pull requests. We had a lot of communication and I personally owned the "back-end" and was able to ship stuff fast. I knew how every piece of code worked. We eventually (to our protest) got a few new developers. They didn't fit in our silo system. Our lack of tests/PRs didn't scale. We tried to reform and encourage people to use pull requests but everyone requested review from one developer who hardly looked at the code (scroll-scroll-scroll-lgtm reviewing.) Code added from people outside of a silo didn't fit in at all with the rest of the code base. Testing was never made a priority. Eventually I left and took with me almost all of the institutional knowledge about some of our services. We made horrible practices work until they didn't. No one would have been able to join that team and fix it. The company I left for had mandatory testing, multiple people code review and lots of discussion. It was like stepping in to an entirely new world of software engineering. In my view you need to install a good culture from the beginning or... good luck. Its all about what you value as an engineer. You and I have similar values in this regard and good practices are worth a lot to me. I don't think your ask is unreasonable at all. I think you are just working with people with different values.