QA is often neglected
Pros
You are allowed to do a 'choose-your-journey' kind of career where you can specialize in most anything you want. You are paid decently well. Most importantly, there is a positive atmosphere that allows questioning decisions that are being made. However, if the decisions come from high up, you don't get a say in them.
Cons
QA is regularly becoming a scapegoat for the perceived decline in software quality (I say perceived because even the higher ups recognize that the stats say that we are always doing better). There is a culture where enhancements and projects are pumped out at an extreme rate due to developers working outrageous hours and because fixes are not being prioritized. Teams are regularly put on quality hold because the number of customer promised projects that are nearing due dates generally distracts the team from fixing the bugs that already exists. This leads to teams building upon broken functionality, which is a HUGE no-no for software quality. Then, when the project is revealed to be buggy, even after excessive rounds of QA testing, the blame is generally laid on QA for not catching the obscure crashes that only occur with bad customer setup and in areas that developers say were supposed to be unaffected.
