[fd111]

A couple of times in my career, I've had the extreme pleasure of working as a dedicated support/backstop engineer within a small-ish (~20 person) development group buried deep inside a giant multinational corp. (I'm one of those seemingly rare weirdos who strongly prefers troubleshooting, bug-fixing, etc.)

My priorities were inverted: customer escalations first, and if you have time left over, then go work on bug backlogs that no one else wants to address. Everyone else sprinted while I bumped along at my own pace -- subject to escalation priorities, of course.

Those were dream jobs for me, and the rest of the teams seemed to appreciate having someone -- anyone, just not them! -- dedicated to the support role.

Is it just my imagination that this kind of (I would say "enlightened") management/organization is rare in the industry at large? Or do lots of dev teams do this sort of thing? And where can I find them? :-)