>High quality QA people are worth their weight in gold.
They absolutely are, but I've only met a couple high quality QA people in my career.
They absolutely are, but I've only met a couple high quality QA people in my career.
If you're a talented SDET, you're probably also, at least, a good SDE.
If you'll make more money and have more opportunity as an SDE, which career path will you follow?
> Many, but far from all, QA people are just not skilled
can also be said of developers.
Not really. Unfortunately some organizations still follow the premise that the job of a QA is exclusively doing manual acceptance testing, and everything else is either beyond the scope of their work or the lowest of priorities.
Based on this, said organizations end up hiring people with barely any programming skills, let alone competence in software development.
What do you get from a QA who barely can piece a script together? What if you extend this to a whole team of QAs?
I've had the utter displeasure of having worked for a company whose QAs, even new hires, could not write a single line of code even if their lives depended on it. They had an single old legacy automated test suite written by someone no longer in their ranks that they did not used at all for anything other than arguing they automated some tests. But they hadn't posted a PR in over a year.
The worst part is that they vigorously lobbied management to prevent any developer from even considering writing their own test suite.
You claim developers can be incompetent. What do you call whole organizations who not only fail to do their job but also actively manoeuver to prevent anyone else from filling in the void?
Most people are mid.
Most people are mid because you define mid based on where most people stand. The good ones are those who stand out among their peers.
Being mid and competent are two different concepts though. That also depends on the organization you're in. In some orgs, the "mid" can be high-quality, whereas in others the "mid" might even be incompetent.