Subjective relativism and IT
Today we are going to talk about subjective relativism and how it projected onto IT industry. Also, there will be some examples that shows it in its full form and in the end why it is tricky to deal with.
About Subjective Relativism
It is an ethical theory, that main implication is that everyone have their own point of view, and when for someone something is seen right, for other person it could be wrong.
The Subjective Relativism justifies the position where both those arguments are right and wrong at the same time.
IT example
As for the example of it happening in IT sphere there could be when the manager is wanting their programmers to work faster because the feature they are working with "aren't that big". However, for programmers the size of a feature isn't measured by how much code they wrote to it, but how much work has done to it working correctly. The code could simply be 200 lines wide, however because of the amount of logic and amount of libraries used in the process, the risk of bugs appearing there could be much higher there, thus creating an additional work for debugging it and fixing it.
Another example is that company could agree that deleting some rarely used feature is a good idea, while there are some users that rely on it will say otherwise. This deleted feature could even be crucial for someone. For example, when program removes speech recognition, because it was too heavy and rarely used, when a blind user was finding this feature a real life savior.
Real life examples
As for the example happened in real life, there could be used a popular example of YouTube deleting dislike button. To company it looked like a right choice because it mitigates the "hate-waves" that could ruins some channels' reputations for a long time. But for users it looked like a complete disaster, because the first thing the average user did back there when opening a video is to check a like-dislike ratio and if it is abnormal, then open comments to see why it happened.
Those two points of view is both right, however for each group's point of view, the opponent's position hadn't looked that valuable as their position. That is why this conflict is still present to this day and could be debated over and over.
Conclusion
The Subjective Relativism shows, that every decision someone make could look right or wrong depending on each person and that it is impossible to make all people happy about it. That's why most decisions must be based on your primary user group.
References
Subjective Relativism
YouTube dislike button removal
Comments
Post a Comment