> Too often devs look at QA groups as someone to whom they can offload their grunt work they don't want to do.
That's a perfectly legitimate thing to do, and doing grunt work is a perfectly legitimate job to have.
Elimination of QA jobs - as well as many other specialized white collar jobs in the office, from secretaries to finance clerks to internal graphics departments - is just false economy. The work itself doesn't disappear - but instead of being done efficiently and cheaply by dedicated specialists, it's dumped on everyone else, on top of their existing workloads. So now you have bunch of lower-skill busy-work distracting the high-paid people from doing the high-skill work they were hired for. But companies do this, because extra salaries are legible in the books, while heavy loss of productivity isn't (instead it's a "mysterious force", or a "cost disease").
That's a perfectly legitimate thing to do, and doing grunt work is a perfectly legitimate job to have.
Elimination of QA jobs - as well as many other specialized white collar jobs in the office, from secretaries to finance clerks to internal graphics departments - is just false economy. The work itself doesn't disappear - but instead of being done efficiently and cheaply by dedicated specialists, it's dumped on everyone else, on top of their existing workloads. So now you have bunch of lower-skill busy-work distracting the high-paid people from doing the high-skill work they were hired for. But companies do this, because extra salaries are legible in the books, while heavy loss of productivity isn't (instead it's a "mysterious force", or a "cost disease").