"... back then we saw support staff (such as QA and QAE and tech writers) who worked alongside software developers;" I've personally been working in the indust

"... back then we saw support staff (such as QA and QAE and tech writers) who worked alongside software developers;" I've personally been working in the industry for 20 years, full time for 17. I Can't believe I just read someone asking for QA/QAE/QE. Modern dev shops should be relying on automation for test coverage, and the developers of the code should be the ones writing the tests for their code. There is a place for QE, those are Software Engineers focused on tooling around the automation for tests and such. Relying on QE is an antiquated relic of the bad, very bad, Waterfall days. In those days release cycles were long because shipping software meant that there were releases timed to marketing and cyclical sales. Now software is shipped online. the role of QE has changed to not take crappy code a Dev wrote and validate it, but to be the one responsible for making sure Dev's are actually testing their code and that the code is being measured for quality. The easiest way to make this obvious, go write some code, say a few files worth, and then try to add tests to it later. You need to go back and refactor, in some cases significantly, to make the code testable. Code needs to be written from the beginning as testable. I always felt bad for QA/QE folk, because they would just get handed crap and be expected to do something with it. This is no longer cool. (btw Documentation is also a requirement for all code and should be done earlier, not later. Use your own software and try and figure out how others will use it, and document that. Tech Writers should be dealing with well understood systems...)