What you are describing is how most financial firms still work today. Sure Devs are the escalation in case the first line of support can't solve it. But the adv

What you are describing is how most financial firms still work today. Sure Devs are the escalation in case the first line of support can't solve it. But the advantage of having a first line is that they are specialists in supporting, get better over a period of time, are mentally prepared because that is literally the job they signed up for and it lets Devs focus on core development. To those who say that this allows Devs to get away with murder because someone else is handling it - support escalations are very visible and if your stuff is breaking all the time, you come out looking very bad in the eyes of your management. Not to mention that any self respecting developer would/should apply a basic standard of care to their code. If anyone has developers that don't, it is an individual or cultural issue, not an issue with the model of separate support team.