[PeterisP]

UML is a tool to do something (namely, formal and detailed specification of systems) that in many places nowadays isn't really done. I think it is totally plausible that over 7 years of professional work OP has never been in a situation where one person has made a detailed design and wants to present it in a formal manner to other people in the team using diagrams (as opposed to answering specific questions of "what does this particular thing in the code do"). If they discuss the process, they tell about the process without using an activity diagram. If someone wants to view a database diagram, they use some tool that autogenerates one from the data, and discards it after viewing instead of attempting to maintain it as a formal documentation.

I agree that all those diagrams are also very useful to explain the whole software system to people who are new on the project, however, that doesn't imply that having this ability is common, many (IMHO most, but I don't have the data) companies intentionally don't put in the time and effort to maintain such up to date diagrams for their systems.