>>>>I have read quite a few books lately containing errors where a homophone (note homonym) was used. It gets on my nerves when I am reading. I figured it was some automated spelling system that did that and not the author. How would it have made it by the editors?
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>>>They just wanted to make a big savings, so they fired the old human proofreaders and turned to the new, more profitable kind of proofreaders, called customers.
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>>I have worked for software companies that develop that way. It usually resulted in generating and delivering releases once a month (or less). Also, the developers are more stressed, the customer service area was large in people. And the customers were tick off all the time. (Sounds like a fun place to work.)
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>>It was these types of companies that made me a firm beleiver in QA and test teams. (Currently, half the positions I have had have been as a SDET tester.)
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>I had a job interview the other day with a company that is manifestly lacking a QA function, not to mention other support positions like first line client support and DBA. "We can't justify a full time position for that kind of thing." In the meantime the top honchos spend a preponderance of their time on tasks that would be better assigned to staff or even clerican personnel. Penny wise, pound foolish.

In my last position, the company had large ASP.NET application. They performed manual testing on every build released from development. It would take them 4 to 6 weeks to run through the build varification tests. This resulted in the development team only being able to produce a build once every 4 to 6 weeks. While I was there I discussed and convenced the QA manager that most of the tests they ran could be automated. Now they are happier and more proficent. Granted, they will be needing to either train their testers and automated script writing, or replace them with ones that can.