Comment by _heimdall

QA is still alive and well in many companies, including manual QA. I'm sure there's a wide range these days based on industry and scale, but you simply don't ship certain products without humans manually testing it against specs, especially if its a highly regulated industry.

I also wouldn't be so sure that programming is the hardest of the three roles for someone to learn. Each role requires a different skill set, and plenty of people will naturally be better at or more drawn to only one of those.