Hey Jim,

Thanks again for a thoughtful and thorough response. It turns out I didn't end up having my 1-on-1 meeting with my boss, as I came down with a sinus infection the other night and have been fighting it for the past two days. When I called in, I did ask my boss to reschedule our 1-on-1 as soon as possible, so I'm hoping I can get it in before my meeting with our department head. If not, I see her often enough that I can pull her aside for 5 or 10 minutes to let her know what's going on.

Your idea about focusing on specific, tangible outcomes is well taken. I already did plan on going in with a cheat sheet of ideas written down, but in its draft form (which I've had some time to work on at home since I'm out of work) I definitely do need to focus more on outcomes instead of pointing out the current problems. The thing is, I don't want it to look like I'm demanding these things out of thin air, and because our department head only knows what's going on from the perspective of his direct reports, I think I need to at least introduce the problems so there's some kind of context. If I start saying "I don't want to do support anymore," or "I want a pay raise because I'm doing more than the others" it will look like I'm just being greedy. I think I need to at least paint a picture of the current state of affairs for him (from my perspective and not the tainted one he gets from my boss) to frame the problem in such a way that I can then point out specific actions that can be taken. Does that make sense?

I will continue to refine my goals for this prior to going in, but I think the underlying thing that needs to be changed is the constant focus on deadlines instead of quality. The overriding target objective for me is to basically say "stop the insanity" with the absurdly aggressive planning and complete doubletalk regarding quality. Either we're a sweatshop that churns out code to try to meet everyone's demands, or we reallocate staffing and chop a project or three off the list so we can actually do the job right the first time.

That's something management can definitely do something about, and if they continue to deny there's a problem with quality, I have many examples and hard statistics to refute that. The most recent one is a project that just went into system testing three weeks late, in which the people on the project were working 50-55 hour weeks, and within one day of testing, there were 15 high-impact defects (showstoppers.) This is only the most recent example. On another project that I'm being asked to code review, one of the developers on the project said "we expect the code review to be completed in an hour." An hour? For a code review? Oh, and the project is a custom single sign-on solution using SAML assertions to seamlessly authenticate users coming from another company's corporate intranet. Probably 5000 lines of code, and he says that we're supposed to finish in an hour. Hello?

I'm not saying that if I was "king for a day" I could change this entire "get it done now, make it right later" culture, and I know how hard it is to say no to customers. But I need to know from our department head if he's aware of these kinds of problems, and that one way to go about fixing them is to put the talented, motivated people in the right positions. That's where I think I fit in. Is that goal-oriented enough to use as the basis of my argument?