In my experience, such "tragicness" came from the fact that the company already made their decision: automate the tests, fire those other guys. So once me and m

In my experience, such "tragicness" came from the fact that the company already made their decision: automate the tests, fire those other guys. So once me and my colleagues showed up, the final nail was already in coffin. The mindset of improving the testers work, enabling those humans to do better work, is rare in big corps. I've witnessed many QA departments shutdown or being shipped overseas. In the latter cases, you would be inclined to root for team "manual work" (i.e. at least some person gets a job somewhere), but corps are just prolonging their cultural malpractice. Just by dumping labour costs you're not improving productivity.