I write sites for a government, and I most certainly write code to standards, then to aria, and finally pick apart any IE weirdness. This has been quite the fight over the years, but if we want to be considered professionals and called engineers, then we follow standards, and when an employer says "I want you to ignore standards because we don't need it" you have to say no, I'll do this right, or you can find someone else to do it. If we all did this from the start, we wouldn't be in the mess we are now.