Just give your boss what he wants. Optimize for metric "number of bugs solved". Fighting back costs way to much energy and is usually useless. I have been in s

Just give your boss what he wants. Optimize for metric "number of bugs solved". Fighting back costs way to much energy and is usually useless. I have been in similar situation before. I joined team with absolutely un-maintainable code. Build process took 1 hour, was semi-manual and involved 3 machines. This was mission critical application, but management rejected any sort of investment into maintainability. We made QA builds only once a month, because it was too tricky to test and verify entire app. I fought back and cleaned worse mess in my free time. I automated and virtualized build into single machine. I wrote 'sort of' integration tests to automatically verify build. At end we even had continuous integration. But it was not me who benefited from improved productivity. Number of closed bugs in UI skyrocketed. But I usually do hard & sneaky concurrency issues, which were still hard to fix. At end I was marked as 'unproductive' and eventually quit.