Absolutely QA "should" exist. Our QAs are the most knowledgeable people on our product, often informing devs and product alike of requirements, missing requirements, weird configuration outliers, how to actually use the damned app, etc. Without QA we would be developing and testing for brittle requirements to get code into an MVP state, not a functional, user-friendly state.
"Should" is one of those words. QA absolutely should not exist. Developers should not write buggy code to begin with! But they do, so QA (in some form) must exist for software to be any good.
It's not just finding bugs, QA people are the people who actually USE the product, every part of it, every single day. They find pain points and things to improve and things that don't make sense constantly. But yes they're also really good at finding bugs.
That's a great way of putting it. I'm a Java developer also; I'm most comfortable with Java and, dare I say, I like Java. But Java would be far down the list of tools I'd use to make a CL program.
Same. I got it when I was 19 from recording music and the audiologist said, "This is something only old people get, and even then very gradually. You will either go crazy or depressed." But I've gotten used to it and I wouldn't say it's been a huge detriment.
Such a lie. I started getting mild tinnitus at 20 from playing in rock bands. Then at 24 it got less mild from partying. Then at 27 it got worse, I don't know why.
Yeah, I'll take it all day long. I'm not even done with my first year of my first software engineering job so perhaps I'm full of optimism and hope. But in a previous life I was cooking on a line and moving tons of gravel with a wheelbarrow with my brother. I much prefer my situation now.