When I worked in QA many years ago I was just as much a coder as I am now. As a self taught programmer from an unpromising background I tried to take the route that was most accessible to me. I wasn't the only programmer or artist in the QA team looking for a way up. Before I got that job I worked in a factory cleaning up animal figurines with a dentists drill after they came out of the moulds. I could code then too.

The job you do says nothing essential about who you are or what you are capable of. It is often purely circumstantial.