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I went this route. Once you are in QA it is extremely difficult to get out. Everybody views you as "a tester" no matter how good your development skills are. If you genuinely want to be in QA as your career, or if you are truly desperate for work and willing to spend the 5 years or so it will take for you to dig yourself out of QA, then do it. It worked for me. But if you really want to dev, do not take a QA job unless you really can't find a dev job.

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100% correct. I did a brief stint in QA before I moved into dev. That job no longer appears on my resume, because I don't want to do those things anymore.

I know a guy who's a senior QA and has been writing automated tests in Python for over 10 years. He can't get hired as a developer because of this "pigeonhole effect." It's nothing to do with his personality, either. He gets hired in QA with no issues.

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