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QA and dev are two different skills. It's like saying that we save on design by having the devs do it, or having your quarterback also play noseguard. Sure it works in high school, but not when you're a pro.

I'd much rather hire someone who knows testing and QA well and let my devs focus on writing bug-free product code.

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I disagree. Developers who don't know how to test are bad developers, they should go. And conversely, if you have QA, they should know how to develop, otherwise you're paying them to hunt, peck, and click. Why not have QA write the code to have computer do that and save like 1000x the time? That's efficiency AND quality.

Of course QA knows how to program. But their skillset is about breaking code. It's about writing this crazy C++ function that shows how your API has a security bug in this case. As developers their like dev tools developers as their customers are generally devs.

Skillset maybe isn't the right word... mindset maybe better word. Both should be good programmers -- in fact you'll often have more test code than product code. But you likely won't be able to switch your dev team to QA and vice-versa and get the same results.

You're lucky to have QA people who know C++, I've never met one. Maybe I've been in too many web-oriented startups.

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