Years ago, not long after I started at Amazon, there was a huge Netflix outage[0]. It surfaced - or at least was widely speculated - that the cause was a pretty green employee running a DROP TABLE command against a prod database instead of a dev environment.
One morning when I came in and sat down at my desk, all of the old-timers were having coffee and discussing the fiasco. I was very happy to hear all of them talk about how mistakes happen, and the last person to be blamed for such an outage is the poor guy or gal that hit the ENTER button. Rather, blame falls (to various degrees) on: the engineers in their orbit who should be backing them up; the managers helping to onboard them; the chain of command; the entire system that is in place to prevent inappropriate access.
One of my best early-in-career lessons was that it takes maturity to own up to your mistakes (no matter how bone-headed), and it also takes good managers and a good company to foster an environment in which you can own up to them without fear of losing your job. Any company that wants to hang a weight around an intern's neck for something like this is not a company I would want to support in any way.
One morning when I came in and sat down at my desk, all of the old-timers were having coffee and discussing the fiasco. I was very happy to hear all of them talk about how mistakes happen, and the last person to be blamed for such an outage is the poor guy or gal that hit the ENTER button. Rather, blame falls (to various degrees) on: the engineers in their orbit who should be backing them up; the managers helping to onboard them; the chain of command; the entire system that is in place to prevent inappropriate access.
One of my best early-in-career lessons was that it takes maturity to own up to your mistakes (no matter how bone-headed), and it also takes good managers and a good company to foster an environment in which you can own up to them without fear of losing your job. Any company that wants to hang a weight around an intern's neck for something like this is not a company I would want to support in any way.
[0] https://netflixtechblog.com/a-closer-look-at-the-christmas-e...