Developers should definitely stay in touch with the end users and I'm a big fan of the principle, when camarades.com was still a thing we did something like this but on a much smaller fraction of the time.

Which helped in another aspect as well: if you get hired as a developer but you end up doing support half the time you will likely be looking to leave for a company where your job title matches the work that you do.

Initially, lots of complaints and pushback.

Afterwards, a lot more collaboration, emphasis on global vs local optimization, and dare I say increased empathy.

Highest functioning team I've ever worked on. I still miss it.

I'd observe dedicated customer support reps interacting with customers. In a digest. At 1.25x normal speed or faster. A written transcript would be even better. I can't imagine actually being the support person, with synchronous communications. It would be very stressful for me.

I really hope you disclose up-front in your job advertisements that the developer jobs are actually hybrid jobs that are 50% customer support representative.

I've seen it used effectively. I've had customers write in about a bug that I was able to solve almost immediately. No bug submission, no triage, and an apology from someone who wrote the code with the bug. This a) got us a super happy, referenceable customer, b) fixed a longstanding but infrequent bug with almost no overhead, and most importantly c) reminded me as an engineer that real people use the stuff I build.

I've seen other engineers fix long standing issues with password resets. I've seen designers tweak the language in welcome emails. I've seen a CEO fix a pricing issue on the fly during a live chat with a customer.

Being the support person also gives you empathy for the support people that support the things that you build, and to fix death by a thousand paper cut issues. That's how you afford support days: it makes your customers happier, increases customer retention, and fixes dumb inefficiencies of your support team.

"2 1/2" is 2.5, even by a generous reading. If it is not 2.5, that is an easily avoidable mistake in technical writing. A few more minutes proofreading the user manual could have saved you many half-days in support, señor.

It wouldn't be all on one day a week, because that would be "one day a week" rather than "two half-days a week". Again, presuming good technical writing. So a four-hour stint on support, twice per week. That's only 40% as bad as five half-day shifts per week.

I presume four hours. Obviously, "1/2 day" could also plausibly be 6 hours or 12 hours, or half of a work day of unspecified length, or a time equivalent to half of a work day, occurring at a time other than during ordinary business hours. He has previously mentioned he is available at any time, for paid customers, so somebody is checking the messages on weekends.

With respect to your anecdote, if you didn't write it down, it didn't happen. You still need to write up (and immediately close) the defect report, and attach the customer interaction reports. You don't work for the customer; you work for your company, who works for the customer. And the company needs to know what you did, and why it was necessary, because when you are gone, so is the portion of institutional knowledge that lived only in your head. Your story tells me that this everyone-on-support practice enables workers to cut corners in the development process. It's only more efficient until reaching a certain scale, at which point it becomes a liability.

Your story might also give a corporate attorney some stress. As a company employee, you should never apologize on behalf of the company in a way that even suggests the company might have been at fault for anything. That type of says-nothing, customer-placating apology is an acquired skill.

Would the apparent advantages remain if each person were required to go on a "ride-along" with a dedicated customer support person? Silently listen in on their interactions? Like pair programming, except the support person always does all the driving? That might also be useful with sales staff, to improve requirements definitions. Or with management, to smooth out inefficiencies in process and status monitoring. Why not just make the whole company developers, doing other people's jobs? Because even though developers might be objectively better at customer support than a customer support representative, the work done on customer support does not generate enough additional revenue to pay them a developer's wage while they are doing it. Economic specialization separates the jobs, and pays at different rates. People do what they are best at individually, and exchange the results via trade and communication. Cross-trained generalists only work at small scales.

That's why small, niche companies can run circles around established behemoths within their niche. But they can't scale bigger until they squeeze the reliance on robust individuals that apparently makes them so agile out of their system, and replace that with robust processes.

While every style guide I've ever read would say never to do this for exactly this ambiguity, they also would demand that two-and-one-half, expressed as a mixed fraction, would be presented as “2½” if a fraction character is available or “2-1/2” in media where that isn't an option. With “2 1/2” as two space-separated elements, “two one-half days” is a more natural reading, IMO, than “two-and-a-half days”.

  12h       = 50% 24-hour calendar day
   6h       = 50% global mean 12 hours of daylight
   0h - 12h = 50% actual local hours of daylight
   4h       = 50% standard 8-hour workday
   5h       = 50% 8 AM to 6 PM business hours
   ???      = opening until midday break
   ???      = midday break until closing

  2-1/2 days = two-and-a-half days
  2 1/2-days = two half-days

I mean I'm sure they could manage it and it'd be good for employment, but they're not going to.

Except in Ads. Those (almost) always work. The customers who spend here have dedicated technical contacts. Go figure.

Even then, it's not always ideal.

A few years ago I did AdWords for a company that dumped five figures every two weeks into Google Ads. Sure, we had our own person at Google assigned to us. But the person was reassigned to another department in Google every two months, and we ended up with someone new and wasting two or three days bringing them up to speed on our specific needs.

So during a five day week that's up to 50% of the time?