I'm a software engineer. I work in a mid-sized startup that is growing very, very fast. Overall, I love my job, my coworkers and the atmosphere.
One thing about my company is that most staff have technical background. Even our product managers, QAs, customer support, sales team have engineering background. This may sound ridiculous and unnecessary to some people, but it makes a lot of things very easy for me. I can just go to a support member and explain the bug/feature/algorithm in engineer-speak and they'll immediately understand and respond to the customer in the appropriate human-speak/business-speak language. This enables product managers to design a good tech product. E.g. one of our product manager is EE engineer by education so it's very easy to talk to them about various aspects of my work, they understand the difficulties, priorities etc.
There is one coworker in QA team that unfortunately frustrates me though. I've been working with them closely last few months since we're making a brand new product and I'm the tech lead of one of the parts. Their job title is "Hardware QA engineer". They do know basic things like how to use terminal, read code, basic electronics etc. But whenever we go into more tricky topics like debugging non-trivial stuff, they seem a little helpless. I end up debugging with them for extended periods of time. At some point, they dictate me what they're trying to test, and I run (manual) tests for them. These parts aren't even related to my part of the pipeline. My work is tested and working, but there are other issues elsewhere and to make sure my work isn't buggy I need to understand bugs in other parts too, and since they do it inefficiently, I end up doing the work.
I must also say that I'm definitely not talking about a coworker who's slacking off or anything like that. (and even if they did, I wouldn't care since I'm not any higher position than them; in fact, I'm more junior). I'd imagine for a QA position they have more than enough technical expertise. They understand technical concepts and can perform tests. It's just that they seem to bottleneck the development as everyone else, even in less technical positions, have more knowledge in the field. This frustrates me. How should I approach this situation? I believe since they're doing everything right, I should correct the way I approach this issue?
I just want to make sure I respect my coworker and improve my and company's productivity and make the best product we can make. Any ideas?