Those are great points, Amy, and I totally agree!

I think the point is that no one with good enough skills to write production code wants the much lower QA engineer salary, but junior developers who need a first job would be happy to accept any job at any pay.

It's not the best fit for a number of reasons, but someone with 6-12+ months in a QA engineer position applying for other roles is much more likely to be considered than junior developers with 0 months of full-time software engineering experience.

Cheers!