TikTok owner ByteDance sacks intern for sabotaging AI project
TikTok owner ByteDance sacks intern for sabotaging AI project
Chinese technology giant ByteDance denied reports that the incident caused more than $10m of damage.
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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.
I work at a small tech company, by no means big tech. I know it’s common for interns to be treated as employees, but it’s usually in violation of labor law. It’s one of those things that is extremely common, but no less illegal.
The US Department of Labor has a 7 part test to help determine if an intern is classified properly. #6 is particularly relevant to this.
I think an important detail is likely missing. My experience as a software engineer intern included getting paid well and full benefits as an employee. So legally I was an hourly employee and I think the label of "intern" was to set expectations work/performance/responsibility.
Yeah totally, that’s an important distinction. Paid interns are definitely different than unpaid interns, and can legally do essentially the same work as a paid employee.
The way the distinction was explained to me is that an unpaid intern is essentially a student of the company, they are there to learn. They often get university credit for the internship. A paid internship is essentially an entry-level job with the expectation that you might get more on-the-job training than a ‘normal’ employee.
This article doesn’t say if the intern was paid, but it does say the company reported the behavior to the intern’s university, so I’d guess it was unpaid.
The university I went to told us not to bother with unpaid internships, because it's just a sign the company doesn't care about you. Paid internships pretty much always still give college credit.
Yup, we only do paid internships, but they don't get full-time benefits, only whatever is required for part-time employees (because they are part-time, we only have them for 20-ish hours/week).
Yeah, same at the company I work at - interns are paid and have benefits, including housing provided by the company.
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!
Yup, same. We'll try to vary the work they do so they get a good range of experience, and they'll have a more senior dev assigned to help them whenever they get stuck. We won't put them on high priority projects, but the changes will still be important and will go to production.
The main difference we have between a junior dev and an intern is the expected length of the contract. A junior dev is a FTE, whereas an intern is employed only for 3 months or whatever, though that contract may be extended if we like them.
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.