It's a sign of poor management that someone has to be fired when something goes wrong, outages are learning situations for all involved, and it is widely held that the person who took the action that caused an outage is not responsible, but that all involved are responsible.
"Accidents emerge from a confluence of conditions and occurrences that are usually associated with the pursuit of success, but in this combination—each necessary but only jointly sufficient—able to trigger failure instead."
The person who pushed the button is not at fault, the manager is not at fault, the guy who designed the button is not at fault - all are jointly responsible.
Blaming the intern does, however, reflect extremely poorly on Itoh and everyone else in the chain of command. A superior who demands retribution for a simple mistake that happened to cause him or her pain is basically worthless.
See John Allspaw's Swiss Cheese Theory : http://www.kitchensoap.com/2012/02/10/each-necessary-but-onl... .
[ Edit: I guess it's not Allspaw's model, but he applies it to systems engineering rather well - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model ]
"Accidents emerge from a confluence of conditions and occurrences that are usually associated with the pursuit of success, but in this combination—each necessary but only jointly sufficient—able to trigger failure instead."
The person who pushed the button is not at fault, the manager is not at fault, the guy who designed the button is not at fault - all are jointly responsible.
Blaming the intern does, however, reflect extremely poorly on Itoh and everyone else in the chain of command. A superior who demands retribution for a simple mistake that happened to cause him or her pain is basically worthless.
But, I forget, we're talking about Ronald Reagan.