This is a good sequence of events. Kind of what happened to me after I graduated from school - I didn't have much programming experience (my BS was essentially

This is a good sequence of events. Kind of what happened to me after I graduated from school - I didn't have much programming experience (my BS was essentially a math degree and I did it in < 2 years), so they hired me to answer phones, then from there I did level 1, then level 2, then releases, then level 3, then bugfixes and then I was finally granted the title of Dev. Has the benefit of making sure you know the cost of issues and outages, knowing how to spot bugs, and generally how to be a good citizen both with the dev teams and the rest of the company at large.