There's a parallel between dev and QA here. Writing code is generally easy. Figuring out what code to write is hard. I can spend 80+% of my day thinking about

There's a parallel between dev and QA here. Writing code is generally easy. Figuring out what code to write is hard. I can spend 80+% of my day thinking about an overall system, what things are important, and how to design things so that they both work and don't prevent change later. Then sitting down and writing the code to do that is (usually) the easy part. Writing automated tests is generally easy. Figuring out what tests to write is hard. Does the code break on normal cases? Does it break on edge cases? Does it handle all the known use cases? Does the implementation actually achieve what the client is asking for? Does what the client asked for actually make sense? You can't just automate away testing. Automated testing (unit, functional, system, etc) is a power multiplier for both dev and QA... not a total solution.