[pdelbarba]

You don't need any 10x PhDs. You need some competent, well paid QA devs to go over the product and make sure the obvious stuff is working before you ship.

I've heard of a bunch of companies cutting QA staff in the past year or so. Upper management sees them as an obstacle to shipping and middle management sees them as the "source of all the bugs" and an entire office not "producing" anything so they're clearly not useful.

[bluGill]

It doesn't help that there are a to of automated test zealots telling management that if you put your effort into automated tests you won't need manual testing. If you listen carefully the experts are really saying that is the ideal, not that it will ever be the reality.