Tiered support is an anti-pattern
Back when the first internet bubble was bursting I had my first web development job. We thought we were sophisticated because we used Macromedia Drumbeat whose killer feature was, gosh, dynamic ASP and JSP websites. This put us a cut above those ‘amateurs’ who chopped huge TIFFs into static HTML using Fireworks (pfff)!
We also did a lot of other stuff, like edit our files directly on production. We were doing Continuous Delivery (without the source control or build server ;P). We also did our own support. We were responsible for everything, from the code we wrote to the web server itself and even the relationship with our ISP.
When something went wrong people phoned or emailed the web site team direct. Yes, there were plenty of ‘it works on my machine’ and ‘ignore that error, just refresh’ and ‘hang on, I’ll just recycle the IIS process’ but we had our fingers on the pulse of our users. And when there was a problem we could fix, we fixed it. Immediately. While the user was on the phone.
That’s how we rolled in those days. Seat of your pants, in touch with our users. Yes, we had a lot of bad habits but we knew IIS4 was rubbish and crashed regularly, we knew that one of our badly written pages was responsible for bringing down the whole site at peak times, we knew that our perl script to upload ads failed on a regular basis.
