"Call me an ignorant youth, but it seemed like, if they wanted to, they could raise salaries, fire the bottom X%, and hire some more talented QA testers, and still come out ahead."
Not ignorant at all; this is a very insightful observation. I've seen the same thing from the programming side. Unfortunately, an unskilled programmer can create more and longer-lasting damage than an unskilled QA tester -- some code sticks around for decades and has layers and layers of new code built on top of it. Thus, bad programmers can drag down other programmers' productivity long after they've left the project. So the advantage of replacing a lot of bad programmers with a handful of good ones who are better paid could be even greater.
Not to mention that a smaller group has much less communication overhead than a larger group (as described in The Mythical Man Month).
Not ignorant at all; this is a very insightful observation. I've seen the same thing from the programming side. Unfortunately, an unskilled programmer can create more and longer-lasting damage than an unskilled QA tester -- some code sticks around for decades and has layers and layers of new code built on top of it. Thus, bad programmers can drag down other programmers' productivity long after they've left the project. So the advantage of replacing a lot of bad programmers with a handful of good ones who are better paid could be even greater.
Not to mention that a smaller group has much less communication overhead than a larger group (as described in The Mythical Man Month).