My universal advice to graduating CS students is, "no matter what your current code quality/dev speed balance is, your boss will think you're polishing too much."
Third advice. It's not enough to fix bug, everyone MUST know that you fixed that weird bug that customers were complaining about for years and noone could understand the cause.
The important word here is pretend. If the system is safety critical you'd think that quality matters. It doesn't. What matters is following the process laid out in ISO 26262 or whatever standard applies to your field. Whether or not that improves quality is not important (it does, but only a little). The important part is that you have reduced/no liability for accidents if you can prove that you did everything by the book.
Edit: It's all about documenting that those things have been done and signed off on, so keeping track of paperwork.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Do_You_Care_What_Other_Pe...
...where he talks about his role and questions regarding the Challenger shuttle disaster; I don't know if things have changed much since then at NASA, but I suspect they haven't, given Columbia and such.
After all, that is the point of those heavy processes: manage to product something fairly reliable despite the acknowledged presence of morons and shitty managers. The process does not try to eradicate those people, it works around them with some kind of redundancy.
Having been one of those 'concerned' people, I must admit it is exhausting. You know that if some work comes from this guy, or that company, it will be 90% shit and you have to explain them again and again what is wrong and how to fix it, or do it yourself when you are really fed up. So basically you do your job + the slackers' job. That is how the system works. As a system, the result is not too bad. As far as individuals are concerned, however...
If you have to remind people of it, it's as good as not existing in the first place.
> What can you do for me or have done for me recently?
Services provided so far in the past that need to be reminded are at best irrelevant and it can actually hurt you to bring them up.
I'm not saying that it is nice, only that humans behave individually and (even more collectively) according to this.
You might also carefully consider your company's culture when deciding how to split your efforts between new (user-visible) features, preventive maintenance, and bugs affecting end users (especially any VIP end users that have your managers' ears).
For example, a 'Hero' culture rewards last-minute, late night, death march efforts, whether to fix an urgent problem, or to add that one feature that is (supposedly) needed to land a specific high-value customer/sale.