I know many Salesforce teams, maybe most, where the team spends half its time or more on fires. First level support. Bug fixing. Deployments that need three people and a weekend to get through.
And because it has always been like this, everyone treats it as the cost of doing business.
It is not. No other industry would accept it. If half your factory floor spent half its time fixing the machines instead of running them, nobody would call that normal. They would call it broken.
I also know enough teams where it looks completely different. Deployments just go through. Roughly 10% of the team covers support, including first level and bug fixing. The other 90% builds what the business asked for. That is normal. That is what a well-run Org looks like.
The difference between the two is not talent, tooling, or budget. It is the state of the Org.
Fires come from dirty Orgs. Unused Fields nobody dares to delete. Flows that duplicate each other. Validation Rules written for a process that died two years ago. Permission structures no one can explain anymore. Every one of these creates friction, and friction shows up as support tickets and failed deployments.
So if your team is permanently in firefighting mode, the fix is not another firefighter but to clean your Org!
Book a free 60-minute Org Technical Debt Audit: a score for Usability and Build Quality, and your top cleanup priorities.