The Six-Week Timeline

The consultants arrived on a Monday. Three of them. Lanyards, laptops, pleasant smiles. They said they were there to "understand the workflow." They sat beside the QA analysts for two weeks, asking questions, taking notes, mapping every decision tree from ticket intake to regression sign-off.

The QA team didn't resist. They answered every question. Some of them were flattered — finally, someone wanted to understand what they actually did. They demonstrated edge cases. They explained the tribal knowledge that lived in no documentation. They showed the consultants exactly how to replace them.

Week three: the pilot announcement. An AI-assisted QA tool would handle "routine regression testing." The team would be "freed up for higher-value exploratory work." The phrasing was careful, optimistic, and structurally identical to every other pre-layoff communication in the industry's history.

The six-week pattern is not new. It mirrors the business process reengineering wave of the 1990s, when consultants mapped factory floor workflows and then recommended the elimination of the workers who had explained those workflows. The Hawthorne studies documented a version of this in the 1920s — observation changes behavior, but what management learned was that observation also documents behavior well enough to automate it.

Manufacturing lost 4.7 million jobs between 1979 and 1999 through variations of this exact sequence: arrive, observe, document, replace. The consultants who mapped Toyota's production system didn't keep the workers who explained it. They kept the system.

The difference now is compression. What took eighteen months of process reengineering in 1994 takes six weeks with modern tooling. The extraction is faster because the replacement is already built. The consultants aren't designing a new system. They're configuring an existing one.

QA departments at mid-size software companies are reporting a consistent pattern: consultant engagement, workflow documentation, pilot announcement, and headcount reduction within a 30-to-45-day window. The pilot phase rarely exceeds two weeks before becoming permanent.

The analysts who remain are reclassified. They become "AI QA supervisors" or "test automation coordinators" — titles that describe a monitoring function, not an analytical one. Their compensation is adjusted accordingly. A senior QA analyst earning $95,000 becomes a test automation coordinator earning $72,000, overseeing a system that runs 14,000 test cases per hour without bathroom breaks.

The racquetball detail is real. A QA team at a Series C startup in Austin reported that three of their eight analysts had started taking extended lunches during the pilot phase because the automated system was handling their queue faster than they could review its output. Management noticed. Not the lunches — the output differential.

The six-week timeline is compressing further. Early reports from 2025 indicate that some organizations are skipping the consultant observation phase entirely, feeding existing documentation and ticket histories directly into AI configuration tools. The extraction no longer requires human intermediaries.

QA as a distinct professional function has an estimated 18-to-24-month window before it is absorbed into development workflows entirely. The role will not disappear from org charts immediately — it will be redefined as a checkpoint function performed by developers using AI testing tools, at which point the dedicated QA analyst becomes a redundancy, not a specialist.

The antibody response — the organizational immune system that should have rejected the consultants — never activated. The QA team cooperated with their own displacement because the process was framed as enhancement. By the time the framing shifted, week six had already arrived.

Read the full pattern analysis for a deeper understanding of the forces driving this assessment.