That's because we don't value QA in the way that matters.

If you're a talented SDET, you're probably also, at least, a good SDE.

If you'll make more money and have more opportunity as an SDE, which career path will you follow?

Also, for most people passionate about software, they'd rather be building than testing, especially if pay is at least equal.

Testing is probably my favorite topic in development and I kind of wish I could make it my "official" specialty but no way in hell am I taking a pay cut and joining the part of the org nobody listens to.

That, and this

> Many, but far from all, QA people are just not skilled

can also be said of developers.

> can also be said of developers.

Not really. Unfortunately some organizations still follow the premise that the job of a QA is exclusively doing manual acceptance testing, and everything else is either beyond the scope of their work or the lowest of priorities.

Based on this, said organizations end up hiring people with barely any programming skills, let alone competence in software development.

What do you get from a QA who barely can piece a script together? What if you extend this to a whole team of QAs?

I've had the utter displeasure of having worked for a company whose QAs, even new hires, could not write a single line of code even if their lives depended on it. They had an single old legacy automated test suite written by someone no longer in their ranks that they did not used at all for anything other than arguing they automated some tests. But they hadn't posted a PR in over a year.

The worst part is that they vigorously lobbied management to prevent any developer from even considering writing their own test suite.

You claim developers can be incompetent. What do you call whole organizations who not only fail to do their job but also actively manoeuver to prevent anyone else from filling in the void?

I am going to say that outside the HN echo chamber, it is closer to all than on the other side. Have you been to fortune 1000 non software corps? If you would throw away 90% of their IT people, people would barely notice. Probably just miss John his cool weekend stories on Monday (which is basically almost weekend!). LLM drives this home, painfully; we come in these companies a lot and it is becoming very clear most can be replaced today with a 100$ claude code subscription. We see the skilled devs using claude code on their own dime as one of their tools, often illegally (not allowed yet by company legal) and the rest basically, as they always did, trying to get through week without getting caught snoring too loud.

I've also met about the same number of high quality developers in my career.

Most people are mid.

> Most people are mid.

Most people are mid because you define mid based on where most people stand. The good ones are those who stand out among their peers.

Being mid and competent are two different concepts though. That also depends on the organization you're in. In some orgs, the "mid" can be high-quality, whereas in others the "mid" might even be incompetent.

I've never seen mid QA people, they are either excellent or useless, no inbetween.

The average QA/SDET I've worked with are far, far less capable than the average SDE.