I love my really thorough QA’s. Yes it’s an antipattern to let me as a dev lean too much on them catching what I won’t. But where I dread even running the code for a minute, they enjoy it. They take pride in figuring out edge cases far beyond any spec. They are definitely worth their weight in gold. It lets developers have confidence when changing things in the same sense a good type system does. For some classes of very interactive apps (e.g games) having unit and integration tests just doesn’t cover the parameter space.
People here are talking about skillful QA worth their weight in gold.
Unfortunately people in the industry who have actual power in planning budgets don't think so. An article is right. QA engineers now are viewed as janitors: no one respects then, better to outsource to cheap location.
