I'd like the group's thoughts on the mindset that views the tester or QA lead
role as a stepping stone to becoming a programmer and that testers are "junior
developers." Of course, on a good agile team, the roles are often blurred (i.e.,
"testers" program and programmers test), but to the extent that a company or
team takes such a hierarchical view, what are the pros and cons?

I saw a thread from 2004 touching on this but I'm wondering if the different
composition of the group and the passage of time yield a different response.

Cordially,
Matt