Ask HN: What is QA like at your company

I started at a company that paid actual human beings to QA test our software. We would set each QA person up with a dedicated environment with builds/release candidates and they would simply try to break the product. The notable thing was that these people were NOT engineers and we did not write automated frontend tests with Puppeteer or Playwright, it was simple human QA testing. This company had a very high standard for quality and we had very few fires to put out.

These days, when I talk to people about QA, software engineers have a kind of contempt for this type of QA, and prefer to write automated playwright tests for all UI interactions. To me, this sounds more complicated and more expensive (paying a software engineer to write a test over X hours compared to paying an entry level office worker to manually test something over Y hours, where I assume X > Y). When I'm in these discussions, people are actually quite opinionated that we should NOT hire QA people, and software engineers should do all QA via automated testing

What is QA like where you work? Is there a culture of trying to automate it all away, or is it still more manual? What do you prefer?