I've done 3DO QA, EA QA, Namco QA, and finally ended up at Sorrent, a cell phone game company, doing QA. Last year, I made the transition to art, which is what my college degree was in.
QA, in my opinion, is a thankless, mind-numbing job. That being said, it's also totally necessary and the most underrated job in the game industry. When Game Developer magazine released the 3rd salary survey, they found that QA turnover is ridiculously high, that most people in QA either quit and move into less mind-numbing things, or they advance into other fields. While most jobs in the industry have people with 6+ years of experience, only a handful of people last 6 years in QA.
When I started at 3DO, I was making 9 dollars an hour. A week later, they had an across-the-board wage cut, so I ended up making 8.10 an hour. My friends still chuckle about that one. Moving to EA, I was at 10 an hour. Namco was 10 an hour also, if I remember correctly. Moving to Sorrent QA, the company was small and the QA manager was a former QA manager at EA and knew what the job entailed, and made sure we all started at 12 an hour, which is definitely pretty generous.
The downside of most QA jobs is the lack of benefits, contract work (3 month, 6 month stints usually). When I was at EA, the hours also became pretty insane. 12 hour days, 7 days a week. Granted, they were high-profile titles, but at that time at EA QA, there was a real slave driver mentality, which doesn't work.
Pure app software QA does pay infinitely better, but like bingle said, it's not games.
Moving out of QA into a desired field that's not production is a feat unto itself. After spending two years doing testing everywhere, moving into art was a combination of luck and determination. One of my coworkers in QA moved into programming, aided partly by a half-finished personal project that he had coded some time ago.
I find that QA takes up a large amount of time and don't know if the hours have gotten any more sane, but the hours that they pull really prevent people from pursuing personal projects. While I was testing at EA, I don't think I did any drawing. I was so exhausted getting home that personal projects were out of the question.
Incidentally, Sorrent is also in San Mateo, not that far away from Sony. In fact, a few Sony QA guys came over to Sorrent and are doing quite well.
