ByteDance sacks intern for sabotaging AI project

I'm reminded of a time that an intern took down us-east1 on AWS, by modifying a configuration file they shouldn't have had access to. Amazon (somehow) did the correct thing and didn't fire them -- instead, they used the experience to fix the security hole. It was a file they shouldn't have had access to in the first place.

If the intern "had no experience with the AI lab", is it the right thing to do to fire them, instead of admitting that there is a security/access fault internally? Can other employees (intentionally, or unintentionally) cause that same amount of "damage"?

From what I've seen in Amazon it's pretty consistent that they do not blame the messenger which is what they consider the person who messed up. Usually that person is the last in a long series of decisions that could have prevented the issue, and thus why blame them. That is unless the person is a) acting with malice, b) is repeatedly shown a pattern of willful ignorance. IIRC, when one person took down S3 with a manual command overriding the safeguards the action was not to fire them but to figure out why it was still a manual process without sign off. Say what you will about Amazon culture, the ability to make mistakes or call them out is pretty consistently protected.

> From what I've seen in Amazon it's pretty consistent that they do not blame the messenger which is what they consider the person who messed up

Interesting that my experience has been the exact opposite.

Whenever I’ve participated in COE discussions (incident analysis), questions have been focused on highlighting who made the mistake or who didn’t take the right precautions.

I've bar raised a ton of them. You do end up figuring out what actions by what operator caused what issues or didn't work well, but that's to diagnose what controls/processes/tools/metrics were missing. I always removed the actual people's name as part of the bar raising, well before publishing, usually before any manager sees it. Instead used Oncall 1, or Oncall for X team, Manager for X team. And that's mainly for the timeline.

As a sibling said you were likely in a bad or or one that was using COEs punatively.