If the expectations around QA aren't clear and you have a bad manager they'll actually force you to rely on QA since QA should be vetting things before they get

If the expectations around QA aren't clear and you have a bad manager they'll actually force you to rely on QA since QA should be vetting things before they get to the customer. I've been told by one manager that I should not waste time writing unit tests and that I should rely on the QA person to test. If the QA person has skills along the lines of a software test engineer (like at Google and other places) and can actually create tools and automate things and write some unit tests or acceptance tests, then they're half-a-programmer and I'll be happy to rely on them and share the work. Otherwise I assume the QA is there just to bow to management/marketing and give the OK for deploys.