> If the QA server is down, the testers are unable to do their jobs, and the team isn’t producing working software. For the QA team, this is a production outage. Fixing it should be a top priority.

Genuine question, does anyone here ITT working in software still have dedicated QA? They laid off all our QA engineers about a year ago, and talking to friends and former colleagues it seems to be the industry wide trend?

FWW I think a good QA person is worth their weight in gold and this has been a horrible mistake. I'm just curious if there are any left.

The problem with QA is that from the POV of management, all they do is find issues and delay releases. If the QA team did their jobs well, then once all of the reported bugs are found and fixed (passes QA), the software runs fine and there are no future problems. This sounds good in theory, but a good release doesn't get the credit it deserves - it's "business as usual".

A buggy release is fine, if it came out faster, and costed less. The bugs in the release can be fixed in the future, and the "heroic" fixes are "creditworthy".

Therefore, over time, the QA team is politically relegated as a "useless" team in the department, and thus given how politics play out, they get sidelined until the entire team is gone.

Different country probably, here QA is still often part of the team. More often than not as part of a team with a title like "test automation engineer".