The essay explicitly seems to suggest that are not Tier 1 support: "Yahoo laid off the highest level of Flickr's customer support, the people that end up filing bugs against the developers and helping the trickier cases get solved for the members."
Not knowing how Yahoo! structures its support personnel, I assume that the "highest level" is not also Tier 1, although I could be wrong. Still, I think the rest of the essay is more of a general paean to website customer support people, and has less to do with the specifics of Flickr.
Not knowing how Yahoo! structures its support personnel, I assume that the "highest level" is not also Tier 1, although I could be wrong. Still, I think the rest of the essay is more of a general paean to website customer support people, and has less to do with the specifics of Flickr.