That sounds like a particularly toxic relationship with QA. I've had quite a few positions where QA was very helpful. In those cases, QA interfaced with users/

That sounds like a particularly toxic relationship with QA. I've had quite a few positions where QA was very helpful. In those cases, QA interfaced with users/customers and had a great level of knowledge of how people actually use the product, and often had a more holistic view of how the entire suite of features works together, compared to developers who had more specialized knowledge of various specific bits. Now, I would agree that ideally developers should get lots of hands-on experience with how customers actually use the software. And I would also agree that ideally developers should have a holistic view of the entire suite of software features, rather than being silo'd. I definitely aim for those things as much as possible, but it's not always practical. Both of the things I listed above add up to a fulltime job, or multiple fulltime jobs if the product is large enough. Usually engineers are in short supply and working mad hours already. I would also like to point out that QA engineers are really vital when it comes to developing games. I do not work in the game industry, but I have a friend who is a QA engineer lead. Games are complex realtime systems and it can take a LOT of work for those folks to find and come up with reproducible cases for bugs.