Not So I think. Consider these jobs

1. A Standards Comittee to review a 3000 page document, one xml file and one data dictionary
2. An Government Oversight Body to Oversee the Standards Comittee
3. A political analyst to analyze what the above 2 are doing.
4. Lobbyist from pharma companies to lobby putting company specific medicine in suggest medication drop down.
5. Patent clerks to process patent like "webased interactions with a indexable search information source that works over the internets"
6. Programmers to have the interface in blue/green
7. Database analysts to integrate custom private databases which keep additional data like "gawks at the nurse"
8. Lawyers who will be eventually tapped when information is leaked and lawsuits fly
9. Additional Help desk to answer "why the thing is so slow?"
10. Network/ System analyst to spend hours in the data centers figuring why the "network is slow"
11. A Business Consultant to tell you that you need a "faster network" to fix the "why the things is too slow" and they have a $10,000 router with $100 cat5e cables.
12. A Tech manager to manage the project and send out "well done emails"
13. A business manager to manage the tech managers and send out "well done and this will help productivity emails"
14. A CIO to oversee the project and go to the press discussing the new strategic approach to searching the database
15. Last but not least the only programmer to actually do the programming/maintenance/troubleshooting/documentation

QA is an excellent place to start as a programmer/developer etc. As one who has already made the switch, it is the QA which gives you the age. Though I do agree with the above post about code reviews and such. Try thinking from a QA perspective. QA needs extensive scripting, just think of ways to handle your data. This translates into handling information when developing applications and user interfaces. If you are not handling data, generate some, benchmarks, measurments, response times etc, Automating reports is just one way to put you in the lead. Second, QA people know how to look for problems, most programmers can follow specs, but how many can generate them? You deal with use cases, business processes. just work backwards how do you implement these. QA people have extensive contacts, you talk to a lot of people, you know how to handle people, I on a personal level find it easier to deal with the program than with customers, most bosses really value the soft skills, that may in fact be why u will get in. Automation is a very important part of QA, start from there and slowly expand your skill sets. QA has a lot of opportunities for one to develop ones programming skills, when you have them, just market them and you are on the way. Anyways i think QA is a better career, its more ordered, the people are nicer(sometimes), deadlines are saner. And you get more free time. :P