A few years ago, “developer” sounded safer than almost any tech title. Then the market changed. Companies cut teams, slowed hiring, and started asking one brutal question before approving roles: Can this person reduce production risk and help us ship faster? That question has been very good for SDETs, QA automation engineers, reliability-minded testers, and engineers who can build serious TypeScript test pipelines. The old split was simple. Developers wrote code. QA tested it