Can't speak for OP, but I can tell you what mine is.
If you have an intern or a Junior Engineer, they should have a more senior engineer to monitor and mentor them.
In the situation where a Junior Engineer gets blamed for a screw up:
1. The Senior Engineer failed in their responsibility.
2. The Senior Engineer failed in their responsibility.
A Junior Engineer should be expected to write bad code, but not put it into production, that's on the Senior. If I hit approve on a Junior Engineer's PR, it's my fault if their code brings the whole system down. If a Junior Engineer had the ability to push code without a review, it's my fault for allowing that. Either way it's my fault and it shouldn't be any other way. It's a failure to properly mentor. Not saying it doesn't happen, just that it's never the Junior Engineers fault when it does.
I'd caveat that slightly: only if the senior engineer is not also overburdened with other responsibilities, and the team has the capacity to take on the intern in the first place. I've been on teams where I felt like we desperately needed more FTEs, not interns. But we could hire interns, and not FTEs.
(I agree with the premise that an intern or junior eng is supposed to be mentored, and their mistakes caught. How else should they learn?)
the amount of time that the summer intern / new grad eat up of seniors time is the problem. Tech debt that does not get addressed in a timely manner because of mentorship responsibilities is the problems
If you don't train new and capable engineers, you'll eventually lose talent due to attrition and retirement. Talent can be grown in-house; engineering companies are much better environments than universities to learn how to build scalable platforms. The cost of acquisition is low, too, because junior engineers can still make valuable contributions while they learn to scale their impact.
If interns are able to take down your infrastructure, then it is the fault of the senior engineers who have designed it in a way that would allow that to happen.
