QA Engineer / Tester Vs Developer

As for the salaries. It is true that Developers make more money than an equivalently skilled an experienced Tester/QA. There are several reasons for this.

First: In Testing there are a great many tasks which can be done by someone with very little technical skills or knowledge (But I always belive every tester should be technical). Indeed in some envrionments there are manual testing tasks which can be done by those who simply lack the intelligence necessary to work as a developer. There are no equivalent development tasks.

Second: Testers do not produce revenue Developers do. Quality is an impossible concept to sell on it's own and nearly as difficult to market. Outside of QA Outsourcing firms no company has ever made money off of it's Quality department. The Developers are the ones who make the products the company sells, all the Quality department can do is act as a "Force Multiplier" we can make other departments more efficient and effective but we can not produce revenue. So when it comes to allocating money for salaries to different departments it is the departments who actually generate revenue that get the bulk of the money.

Third: Generally speaking 1 tester can test the work of more than 1 developer, there are occasional exceptions where the test team has more manpower than the development team but in the overwhelming majority of cases there are fewer testers than developers. Add to that the fact that there are more people capable of being a tester than of being a developer (it requires much less training to begin working as a tester than it does as a developer). Simple supply and demand rules will then have testers making less than developers all other things being equal.

Now the one area where testers have an advantage is that at the start of our careers it is much easier to move up in the ranks quickly, especially if you have a degree in some form of technical field and knowledge of one or more development languages which is probably why some have reported that they are "ahead" of their counterparts who started with the company at the same time but took a developmet path.