It's so ridiculous that people always want QA testers to be programmers. My fiance is a fantastic QA tester but has no interest in programming. She interviewed at Twitter, which at the time did not have a single manual QA tester keeping an eye on their products, and they just asked her a bunch of questions about coding. They should have sat her down and asked her to find bugs. No programmer I know has the patience to do what she does manually. She works with a team that makes extensive use of automated testing. But things still slip through, and it's worth it to have a human being looking for issues. Doing everything with manual QA is obviously stupid. But I think the pendulum has swung too far in the other direction as well. Having no manual QA whatsoever seems like a big waste of time for teams that are large enough to afford it.