Oh, my boss never fails to amaze me...

Every fucking time he talks about changes to someone outside the team he says something like:
"we always gotta be prepared for breaks because it is always like that, you change something here and when you see you broke something there"
All in a manner that *tries* to bring tensions down.

And every time I explain to him why the fuck automated tests are important and wtf they do he always manage to understand it as a waste of time...

I'm never gonna give up, motherfucker.

He's still not wrong, sometimes things still break automated tests or not.

Try rolling an application out to 400+ sites and 50k+ users and your automated tests suddenly aren't worth a damn.

You got it all wrong. Yes, you need automated tests and stuff. They are for you. For your safety and piece of mind. But the rest of the world have to know that if they want changes, something might break and they have to be prepared for it. Changes take time. The time you need to spend on the problem. On coding, or coffee, or playing with your cat, doesn't matter.

Have perfect workflow, provide everything asap, have plenty of time to slack around.

Let the world dictate you what you must do "just now" and "make it flawless" and you'll be doomed.

I'll tell you how it works on my end. I made a little tool to debug the IO of our application. It was outside of any ticket, undocumented and stuff. I tried to make it legally but failed. But someday he noticed i wad doing the same checks he does in 1/10 of time and suddenly my tool became cool. However to the external world we still present the old way. It's a matter of having some respect for your work, by keeping it black magic :)