I'm fond of developer-QA folks that automate most of their pointing and clicking. There is, absolutely, a skill in finding bugs by exploratory testing, but someone who can combine that with automating previous tests (thus building up a regression suite) in a way that's maintainable is a real keeper.

I think you mean "except when..." As others said, QA automation is a serious endeavor, and an important one.

Unless you're writing test automation.