How do people think google puts software engineers on the phone randomly? That's just an insane idea. I mean, these guys all make what 150k starting with 250k+ salaries not unheard of and you really expect their managers to go, "Oh btw, you're on helpdesk this week. Put on your headset and talk to clueless people for 8 hours today."
It was in The Internship, that's what put the idea in my head, and as far as I know it's in there because they do/did do that, with the idea being you get a better understanding of who you're writing features for if you get your questions from the horse's mouth occasionally.
I once worked at a startup-bought-by-bigco that did almost exactly this. Granted it was level 4, not level 1 support; and it was on a quarterly, not weekly, basis.
