It doesn’t mean they aren’t smart but if they could write code they would, unless you’re working somewhere that compensates QAs and engineers the same (which I’ve never seen). Had a QA coworker try to learn to code and he just couldn’t quite get it.
I'm possibly biased, because explorative testing is one of my weaker areas as a dev. I'm way better at debugging once I know that there is a problem, but finding a problem that I don't know about yet, I find quite hard to do to say the least. And I think it's awesome to observe people who are really good at this kind of thing.
Most nurses could likely become doctors if they so chose, but 8 years of education, a few more years in residency/'bootcamp', and at many places having insane hours + being always on call, and everything else that comes with being a doctor is not everybody's cup of tea.
A nurse is much more comparable to something like a dev whereas a doctor is something closer to a combination of the tech and dev leads. QA doesn't really have an appropriate analog in medicine because every person plays a critical role. A hospital without nurses would become instantly inoperable. By contrast companies can, and have, scrapped their entire QA departments and continue to function more or less normally.
I think a key issue is that software that's overtly buggy reflects more on poor development and management practices than it does on poor QA practices.
The job you do says nothing essential about who you are or what you are capable of. It is often purely circumstantial.
Luck and circumstance definitely play a part in the job you do, but it's plainly not true that your job says nothing about what you're capable of.
Nurses, on the other hand, have a higher barrier to entry as they need at least a year and up to four years of schooling before starting to work. Pay is higher accordingly, with average nursing salaries being $75K as compared to $55k for QA testers. It's probably better when you normalize for cost of living (came studies are in expensive parts of the country, nurses more evenly distributed).
The doctor work slows down from a lack of focus on doctor work, while the nursing work is skimmed over in favor of “enhancing” the self service system.
Complex cases are “solved” by crowdsourcing diagnoses and treatments, because little time available for critical thought on the problem.
Everyone has their expertise and strengths.
Doctors cannot do their job without nurses. MS just tossed their entire QA staff with no apparent consequences.
It can be like working with someone who has the technical understanding of a user, but with write access to Jira, and whose reason for employment is predicated on being a blocker with some frequency.
The best places I’ve worked have instead had engineering cultures of robust automated testing, real-time monitoring, and continuous delivery.