this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2024
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Or three quarters in a few cases.
And of course there are cases where countries spanning as many as 5 "ideal" time zones (dividing the globe into 24 equal slices) actually use a single time zone.
And then when someone tells you the meeting is at 10:00 am, you have to figure out if they mean your time zone or theirs, and if they mean theirs, you then have to convert that to yours. Oh, but your conversion was wrong because one of you went into or out of daylight saving time between the day when you did the conversion and when the meeting took place.
But what is the alternative? Sure, fck daylight saving. Having the date changed at noon is fucked up, too, and that's what happens if you agree to one global time. And having countries that are too big for a time zone is fucked up as well. Russia for example actually only spans to the Ural mountains, everything to the east are colonies. Fuck states in general #nobordersnonations
I personally would prefer if we all used UTC. My working hours would be 23:00 to 07:00. A Brits working hours would be 09:00 to 17:00, and a New Yorker would work 13:00 to 21:00.
But this does have its own drawbacks. Personally I just think those drawbacks, in the sorts of real-world time-related conversations I've had, are less than the drawbacks of dealing with varying time zones.
But yeah, the biggest factor is daylight saving time. Doing away with it is the number one option places that use it should take, regardless of whether one advocates for abolishing time zones or not.
im a proponent of using exclusively UTC for anything pertinent to being accurate, and then using local solar time (the sun) to refer to everything else, it has the benefit of making people look outside anyway.
Normie. Real timezone-haters use Unix epoch. /s
The drawbacks are many and the benefits are few.
Watching foreign films would be a pain, where is this in the world again, what does 19:00 mean for them? More exposition, or you just have to guess based on languag and accent.
I need this work done by our team in XYZ country, what are their working hours? (wow, look at that, still using timezones?)
When you arrive somewhere on holiday, now you have to get a sense of the time there. Or continually be thinking "what's that in my home time?/what's that in solar time", which is why solar time just makes more sense.
People aren't going to stop thinking in solar time, ever. We're hard-wired to be awake with the sun. It doesn't matter what the numbers are, you will associate them with the sun. The question then becomes, would we rather all use roughly the same numbers (timezones, what we currently have), or different numbers (everyone using UTC).
Using UTC solves only 1 problem, you can say verbally to someone across the world, let's make the meeting 15:00 - but this is already easily solved by using a calendar which converts for you...
There's a reason we have never used a single non-solar time, it's just worse and I think there's a reason these posts always end up on programmer focused places on the internet. Yes, I'm sure their job is annoying, and it would be easier to not have to solve time conversion problems, but the time conversion problems wouldn't even go away if you forced everyone to use UTC. You'd just start having to do conversions to solar time, or looking up waking hours (which is just timezones)
This is a solved problem.
Which is short sighted considering it is much easier to make a standardized library for converting time zones than it is to make a standard library reflecting what different time numbers mean in different places around the world. If they somehow convinced people to make the change, they would find out pretty quickly they were better off with the devil they knew.
I agree planning around it is stupid, but I don't see how that affects computer programs.
(let me clarify, this seems like an everyone-issue, rather than a developer-issue)
IMO the problem for developers is that they have to provide general solutions, so they have to cover each case all the time instead of just a singular case at a time.