It's sort of weird in a world that has moved to an DevOps-style ethos for most development.
But yes, before that it would be not at all unusual to have “test engineers” or other technical staff whose entire responsibility laid with setting up test environments and running QA of products. These people did not do product dev, though they may have been involved in writing supporting test platform libraries or even maintaining test infrastructure (like IBM Jazz).
Even today in the U.S. companies that haven’t fully jumped onto newer development practices probably still have QA and/or test departments.
>It's sort of weird in a world that has moved to an DevOps-style ethos for most development.
The world at large makes all sorts of trends, and that by itself doesn't make them smart. As a developer, you are likely to have blind spots when it comes to quality and reliability as a result of having written the code. Even a team of developers cross-testing each other's code will not have the same ability to find flaws (before they embarrass you in front of the customer/client/user) as a dedicated tester whose job it is solely to find new (and old) ways to break things (and document them.)
DevOps is a completely different thing (though they work together with testers.)
It is only weird to have dedicated QA on your team if you don't give a fuck about releasing shit with bugs in it for the user to bump into.
Isn't this still a thing? "Software Engineer in Test" being the newer term?
I just checked LinkedIn and they have quite a few job listings in this vein. Which makes sense: in the "AI and YOLO" development lifecycle, automated testing is more important than ever.