Mozilla lays off 70

Not sure of Mozilla’s financial or organizational structure but it seems to be part of a larger trend of de-emphasizing QA departments at software shops large and small over the past 10 or so years.

In many ways test automation tooling has become much easier to use, develop, and manage.

But I suspect the larger driving force is that it’s (arguably) a cost center for an org. The burden of ensuring software quality can be shifted to devs and PMs, though usually with mixed results.

For Mozilla, axing quality and security first is a bad look when those are crucial aspects of a privacy-first company value.

I wonder if it's improvements in automation or if QA responsibilities are increasingly rolling up into standard developer roles or because the line between QA and dev is blurring (e.g., software testing now requires stronger dev/automation skills so the QA job looks more like standard software engineering)?