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Comment by sturgill | Hacker News Reader

I’m a big fan of everyone in the world just using UTC and calling it a day. A meeting at 0700 is exactly what you think it means. But I also never expect it to happen.

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It's not as good idea as you may thing:

* https://qntm.org/abolish

Okay, it's "1700Z" and you're at work: are the folks at the Singapore office in yet? If New York's business hours are 14-22Z, what are Berlin's? Bangalore's? Tokyo's? Seattle's?

At least with timezones you can do some simple +/- math and see if you end up in the typical '9-5L' range:

* https://everytimezone.com

But with only-UTC (as much I set my servers to it), you still have to keep a table of business hours.

Keeping track of the buisness hours of a specific office is way easier than keeping track of their timezone, business hours and then convert your local time to their time to see if they're actually open.

Maybe so, but you can pretty reasonably assume that most people are awake and active at 1:00 PM in their time zone.

You can. But especially if you don't have frequent contact with other timezones it is very hard to keep track about how far they are ahead or behind your local time. This gets even harder with DST. While this might be easy if you're just in different US timezones, but it gets increasingly harder with larger distances.

You still have to know exactly the same amount of information to know if someone is working or not, but you only have to know one piece of information per moment, because "what time is it now?" is the same for everyone.

If everyone has the same frame of reference, you don't get coordinate translation errors.

Going to work on Tuesday and coming home on Wednesday will be the new norm for about a third of the world.

> You still have to know exactly the same amount of information

This has been debated before:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8902765

Local time can work only locally, only UTC can work globally.

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