[peterkos]

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"?

[grogenaut]

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.

[Twirrim]

> when one person took down S3 with a manual command overriding the safeguards

It didn't override safeguards, but they sure wanted you to think that something unusual was done as part of the incident. What they executed was a standard operational command. The problem was, the components that that command interacted with had been creaking at the edges for years by that point. It was literally a case of "when", and not "if". All that happened was the command tipped it over the edge in combination with everything else happening as part of normal operational state.

Engineering leadership had repeatedly raised the risk with further up the chain and no one was willing to put headcount to actually mitigating the problem. If blame was to be applied anywhere, it wasn't on the engineer following the run book that gave them a standard operational command to execute with standard values. They did exactly what they were supposed to.

Some credit where it's due, my understanding from folks I knew still in that space, is that S3 leadership started turning things around after that incident and started taking these risks and operational state seriously.

[tgavVs]

> 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.

[notyourwork]

Precisely, if you ship if, you own it. So ownership isn’t the individual but rather the team and company. Blaming a human for an error that at least another engineer likely code reviewed, a team probably discussed prioritizing and eventually lead to degradation is a poor way to prevent it from happening again.

[evanextreme]

At least in my experience, this is also how Azure continues to function. Certainly reduces stress in the working environment

[DrillShopper]

It's a shame that they're so bad at (physically) delivering their products these days.

[bawolff]

There is a huge difference between someone making a mistake and someone intentionally sabotaging.

You're not firing the person because they broke stuff, you are firing them because they tried to break stuff. If the attempt was a failure and caused no harm, you would still fire them. Its not about the damage they caused its that they wanted to cause damage.

[ozim]

But for damaging company assets on purpose firing is only first step.

I do not see any mention of other legal action and article is shallow.

It might’ve been that someone in command chain called it “malicious” to cover up his own mistakes. I think that is parent poster point while writing out Amazon story.

[donavanm]

I worked at AWS for 13 years. I did “aws call leader” for 7 years, and worked in the reliability org when we rebuilt the coe tool. Ive personally blown up a service or two, and know other PEs whove done the same or larger.

Ive never heard of an individual being terminated or meaningfully punished for making an earnest mistake, regardless of impact. I do know of people who were rapid term’d for malicious, or similar, actions like sharing internal information or (attempting to) subvert security controls.

On the whole I did see Amazon “do the right thing” around improving process and tools; people are a fallible _part_ of a system, accountability requires authority, incremental improvements today over a hypothetical tomorrow.

[zmgsabst]

PAM debacle (17Q4) in Device Econ is a counter example.

And that wasn’t even a mistake the SDEs made — they were punished for the economists being reckless and subsequently bullied out of the company, despite the SDEs trying to raise the alarm the whole time.

[godelski]

I think this is an important distinction and the answer is that it is hard to distinguish. People often bring up the Simple Sabotage Field Manual in situations like these and I think there's something that is often missed: the reason the techniques in here are effective is because they are difficult to differentiate from normal behavior. This creates plausible deniability for the saboteur. Acting too hastily could mean losing someone valuable for a genuine mistake. I'm saying I agree with the Amazon example. (You can also use saboteurs to your advantage if you recognize that they are hunting down and exploiting inefficiencies, but that's a whole other conversation)

But my understanding of this case is that the actions do not appear like simple easy to make mistakes. As I understand, the claim was that the intern was modifying the weights of checkpoints for other peoples' training results in an effort to make their own work better. Mucking about in a checkpoint is not a very common thing to do, so should make someone suspicious in the first place. On top of this it appears he was exploiting weaknesses and injecting code to mess with peoples' optimizers, and to do things that do not have a reasonable explanation for.

So as far as I can tell, not only was he touching files he shouldn't have been touching (and yes, shouldn't have had access to), he was taking steps to bypass the blocks there were in place and was messing with them in ways that are very difficult to explain away with "I thought this might be a good idea." (Things that explicitly look like a bad idea). If that is what in fact happened, I think it is not a reach to claim intentional sabotage. Because if it wasn't, then the actions are represent such a level of incompetence that they are a huge liability to anyone within reach.

[0] https://www.cia.gov/static/5c875f3ec660e092cf893f60b4a288df/...

[kleton]

It was one of the STEP interns that took down Google prod by modifying some config file by putting something erroneous into an automated tool. Everyone at the company was locked out, and someone had to physically access some machines in a datacenter to recover.

[dudus]

The difference in this case is intent.

Did the employee have the intent to cause damage? If so just fire him/her.

[danpalmer]

Malicious intent to be precise. Well-intentioned attempts to demonstrate issues for the purposes of helping to fix should generally not be punished, unless there is a wider fallout than expected and that can be attributed to negligence.

[EE84M3i]

I'd like to learn more about the AWS incident, but when I google "us-east1 intern" I get this comment. Do you have a link?

[rafram]

Probably this: https://aws.amazon.com/message/41926/

[Aurornis]

> 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?

This wasn’t an accident, though. The intern had malicious intent and was intentionally trying to undermine other people’s work.

This isn’t a case where blameless post-mortems apply. When someone is deliberately sabotaging other people’s work, they must be evicted from the company.

[raihansaputra]

afaik this was intentional in that they stopped training runs and changing parameters for other employee training runs, and even joined in on the debugging group trying to solve the "issues".

[noobermin]

It's a Chinese company, saving face is far more important for them than "teaching lessons" to anyone, particularly employees who are probably considered expendable.

[throw3828455]

I always laugh when I see these predictable comments about "face" when talking about Asian companies, like they are so beholden to their culture they can't make individual judgments.

I wonder if we applied this culture talk to Western companies how funny it would sound.

The reason Facebook is firing so many people is because individualism "is far more important for them than 'teaching lessons' to anyone, particularly employees who are probably considered expendable."