It's a shame the developer > QA mentality persists. I've been doing QA for some time and love it. Things I like about it:
* Well-compensated (I make 86K + great benefits like matching 401k/etc.)
* At every place I've worked, QA works fewer hours than dev -- not sure if this is due to personality or the natures of the work or what, but I like it
* Some of us actually *enjoy* testing. Weird, huh? It's a different mode of thinking than dev. Devs imagine how things will work, QA imagines how things *won't* work and systematically finds way to expose flaws. Believe it or not, it's FUN to find failures.
* There's plenty of opportunity for programming. QA is far different from what it used to be. There aren't giant labs of manual testers as much. I and most of my colleagues lean on automation quite a lot, and in day-to-day work look much like developers (spending most of our time in IDEs, CI servers, etc.)
But, hey, the lack of competition is nice. During my last job hunt earlier this year, I pretty much had to turn off my phone and sift through everyone vying for my attention.