Near the end of a fairly successful and long programming career I made the mistake of taking a QA job (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5785759 for some details) and boy, was it a mistake. No matter how sophisticated the work, QA people get no respect.
It might be better than no job, but I suspect if you start out with one it could have a long term detrimental effect on your career (I escaped that because my QA job ended with a demanding software project and the company was independantly of my group going down the tubes, Lucent made a bad bet on next generation technology, and in trying to catch up, shipped a ton of equipment that didn't work ... and financed too much of their equipment sales, which ended badly when too many of those companies went bankrupt; see http://www.amazon.com/Optical-Illusions-Lucent-Crash-Telecom... for lots more details).
It might be better than no job, but I suspect if you start out with one it could have a long term detrimental effect on your career (I escaped that because my QA job ended with a demanding software project and the company was independantly of my group going down the tubes, Lucent made a bad bet on next generation technology, and in trying to catch up, shipped a ton of equipment that didn't work ... and financed too much of their equipment sales, which ended badly when too many of those companies went bankrupt; see http://www.amazon.com/Optical-Illusions-Lucent-Crash-Telecom... for lots more details).