9 out of 10 times it's not the developers failing to deliver, but the management failing to provide a good plan and making bad decisions. I suggest that if you'

9 out of 10 times it's not the developers failing to deliver, but the management failing to provide a good plan and making bad decisions. I suggest that if you're only given the nebulous goals of better quality and less downtime, you're going to fail. You need specific goals, like in terms of specific features, that the business wants, then you figure out a plan to achieve those features based on your tech stack and code base within maybe 4 months, and if there are too many features to do that, you push back. That 4 months of features will give you 6 months of work. Then, just ensure you're testing things in a staging env and that you have good ci so that you don't get production downtime. Honestly, though, if they haven't thought of this stuff before and haven't talked to you about this, then it sounds like they're just putting you in s position to fail. You shouldn't have to come to hacker news to get help, and when a department is in dire straights you don't put a developer with no management experience in place, you either pay double to hire an awesome manager right away, or a vp or department head should go down and take over for a while to get it into shape. You should look for new jobs over the next 6 months maybe, too. Just in case.