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TikTok owner ByteDance sacks intern for sabotaging AI project

www.bbc.com TikTok owner ByteDance sacks intern for sabotaging AI project

Chinese technology giant ByteDance denied reports that the incident caused more than $10m of damage.

TikTok owner ByteDance sacks intern for sabotaging AI project
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TikTok owner sacks intern for sabotaging AI project
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  • 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.

    • interns are there to learn. They’re not supposed to do work that would otherwise be assigned to a paid employee,

      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.

    • Yeah. I feel like the headline also misrepresented the extent of what happened.

      But the firm rejected claims about the extent of the damage caused by the unnamed individual, saying they "contain some exaggerations and inaccuracies"

      Is probably the key takeaway and a good summary of what the article is about

    • Doing work, solving problems, and failing is often the best way for people to learn. I will damn near get fired before I let management schlep menial busy work onto an intern or tell them look but don't touch. If an intern has to do some kind of mind numbing repetitive task, it won't be anything that I myself haven't already had to an equal amount of or at least will be doing side by side with them. As you said, they are there to learn, not fill a hole management was too cheap or lazy to do. .

      It is probably worth while to note that in my industry interns are generally paid pretty well. My internship back in the day paid about double what my job in IT paid when I took it.

      • Exactly. I wish more people had this view of interns. Unpaid ones, at the very least. I worked with a few, and my colleagues would often throw spreadsheets at them and have them do meaningless cleanup work that no one would ever look at. Whenever it was my turn to 'find work' for the interns, I would just have them fully shadow me, and do the work I was doing, as I was doing it. Essentially duplicating the work, but with my products being the ones held to final submissions standards. They had some great ideas, which I incorporated into the final versions, and they could see what the role was actually like by doing the work without worrying about messing anything up or bearing any actual responsibility. Interns are supposed to benefit from having the internship. The employer, by accepting the responsibility of having interns, shouldn't expect to get anything out of it other than the satisfaction of helping someone gain experience. Maybe a future employee, if you treat them well.

    • In reality, interns are more cheap slaves.

15 comments