Our managers did that shit, too, back when I was in the durable medical equipment industry. They said some shit like “QA as an org is dysfunctional, as evidence by all the complaints. We’re gonna streamline the process by eliminating them and having dev teams do their own QA according to this checklist we’ve developed. We think that we can get the same quality for less money and less bureaucratic overhead communicating between the dev teams and the QA team.” They cut about $2 million in annual salary right then and there. A lot of our QA engineers and even a couple of their managers found out about the restructuring at the all-hands where they announced this.

Fast forward a year, they’re getting the shit sued out of them and have to do a multi-billion dollar recall because of…let’s just call it an “emergent use case” among our customers that no one foresaw and therefore no one tested. That emergent use case was sending people to the hospital. I’ll go to my grave confident that someone whose only job was QA would have absolutely been able to catch that.