The problem with QA is nobody outside of QA understands QA. They think QC is QA so they automate their QC "testing" and assume that is QA. It's not. Moreover th

The problem with QA is nobody outside of QA understands QA. They think QC is QA so they automate their QC "testing" and assume that is QA. It's not. Moreover they never listen to QA nor respect them as people. QA are usually the best people to know what's what when the rubber meets the road. They know where the bodies are buried. They often understand and have a pulse on customers and usage better than product managers. They know the ins-and-outs of how various features interact and how a product as a whole works better than silo'd developers. Historically they were effectively the only "product owners" that could certify a release before it went out. They would coordinate with the right people to ensure all technical and non-technical deliverables and dependencies were met before releases. T hey would be the best approximate and power users. They often maintained test infrastructures on which deployments could be tested. In fact, they were the origins of automation or DevOps as a "thing" because they are the ones who saw all the friction points daily giving rise to CI/CD. Often times nobody listened because they were concerned with features. QA has always been about investing resources within an organization to improve it. In effect, building things for within it to improve it. Now that we have gotten the message to some degree of optimizing some manual pain points -- we kick to the curb those who got us there without any regard to the value they provided -- and instead decide to push to prod and test on production to piss off customers even more. If you ask yourself -- would you feel comfortable driving a car that was built and tested with automation alone? What about a space shuttle or an airplane? Or about medications?Or would you prefer that a human test drivers or test pilots put those products through their paces before signing off on them? -- it might drive it home better. But then again software industry has devolved since the tech bro + VC culture pretty much ate it as they chased those sweet $$$