this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
101 points (92.4% liked)
Technology
58937 readers
3644 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
There’s very little detail in the article. I’d be curious to find out exactly what the intern’s responsibilities were, because based on the description in the article it seems like this was a failure of management, not the intern. Interns should never have direct access to production systems. In fact, in most parts of the world (though probably not China, I don’t know) interns are there to learn. They’re not supposed to do work that would otherwise be assigned to a paid employee, because that would make them an employee not an intern. Interns can shadow the paid employee to learn from them on the job, but interns are really not supposed to have any actual responsibilities beyond gaining experience for when they go on the job market.
Blaming the intern seems like a serious shift of responsibility. The fact that the intern was able to do this at all is the fault of management for not supervising their intern.
Which industry do you work in? In "big tech", it's very common for interns to work on regular projects that full-time employees would otherwise work on. Usually a senior-ish FTE would determine the best project, write a project plan, scope it, define milestones and deliverables, etc, and the intern would just work on the actual implementation.
I'm a senior software engineer on my team, and when it's intern season, we usually find things in our backlog that we haven't had time to implement and that would be interesting for an intern to work on, and spec them out.
Edit: Also, interns are always paid. Generally the large companies don't do unpaid internships.
True, but it's rarely solely the fault of the intern. Code reviews, work buddies, mentors, and managers are all safety nets to prevent issues in prod. No intern that doesn't have malicious intent should be able to screw up production.
That's definitely true!