The MathWorks (makers of MATLAB & Simulink) do this too. For their new hires coming from an MSc/PhD, you spend the first 12-24 months in the Tech Support group as a Tier I with a rotating schedule of 1 week of phone/email support and the next week spent working on a project of your choice with one of the many Dev/QA/BaT/doc/etc groups. The idea is that once you've completed a handful of different projects, you've had a chance to figure out what you like to work on, what group you'd like to work with, and the groups get a chance to see what it's like to work with you for several months on a real project. Once you've been there for 12-24 months you typically apply for a job somewhere else in the org, although some people find that they enjoy doing support and move up into Tier II/III. It's not like doing support for Comcast, you get to talk to a lot of smart people with interesting/challenging questions and issues :)
As Mathworks customer, I've come to hate this, since this involves talking to clueless people with superficial information. Every question that involves something slightly more complex is dispatched to deeper support levels and regurgitated in a more or less screwed up way to me by the tier one guy/gal.
I'm sorry your experiences have been less than positive. When I worked there I followed the path that I described above, and the other Tier I folks I worked with were nearly all smart and helpful. And whenever the customer had complex support questions and it was clear they were clued-in themselves, we usually were able to hand them over to the Tier IIIs to work things out directly between them.
