Any* sane professional development organization is going to try to minimize the amount of time their developers spend writing ASM by hand. There's almost always a higher level tool that's more productive.

* Actually, I worked at a place where the main DOS product had been hand written entirely in x86 ASM. The sanity of continuing such a practice into the 90's is an open question. Rumor had it that even the Windows versions of Wordperfect were written in ASM.

The irony is that the applied pressure probably doesn't produce a superior result to being left to your own devices.

It's helped me a lot professionally, actually - I'm much faster at debugging compiled languages than my coworkers are, and the mental patterns I developed while peeling away the layers of control flow in disassembly map very well to understanding large code bases even when I do have the source.

I think it's mostly a function of time rather than being scared, though - learning how to reverse takes quite a while, and once you've got a professional job where reversing seems entirely irrelevant (and even potentially dangerous), it's hard to justify taking the time to learn how.