Couldn't agree more strongly. The best QA people have the old-school “test to break” mentality. They do weird things, like pulling the network cable out of their machine mid-transaction, or kicking off a series of performance scripts and then powering off servers in a distributed system just to see what happens.

When I got started in software, QA was already in a heavy decline. A mentor who had been a QA manager at Apple told me that being a QA person (in the industry) was once seen as a high-trust position. He was sad at what it became.