Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

This is always a fun discussion, as the reality is the local time makes enough sense for people to just use it. Having to deal with times across the globe is the anomaly, not the norm. Such that it is unsurprising that it is difficult to do.

Even more amusing, the time being fixed length days is definitionally not the norm. Is why the Pacific Northwest is miserable right now. Sun is barely up by 8, and largely down by 5 in the evening. Moving the agreed offset for when we should be awake, as we will do in a couple of weeks, does little to help.

And I want to double down on how I worded that. I often see it proposed that we should all move to UTC or some such, but just change when working hours are. But, largely, that is exactly what daylight saving's time is. Yes, it is couched in silly phrasing of "saving daylight," but it is functionally the same as everyone agreeing to move school hours by an hour.

I will also double down on my silliest of hot takes. With computers in control of most clocks, I think the problem with DST is that it moves everything by an hour. We could, with today's technology, move to something where the clock moves +10 minutes for 6 months and then -10 minutes for 6 months every year and nobody would even really notice.

> Having to deal with times across the globe is the anomaly, not the norm

True, so far. But the world becomes a little more global every year, which makes the time zone friction grow.

My guess is that using both local and UTC time will become very common within 1-2 decades. As in "The raid starts at 11:00 PST/20:00 UTC".

This is unlikely. I work with people all over the world and generally we communicate our own time zone plus the top local time zone for our audience.

In an organization where people are accustomed to indexing their activities to other people who live in a different time zone, it’s actually easier to use the most common time zones than it is to switch everyone to UTC. When using UTC, you have to do the mental gymnastics twice. You first have to relate your own time zone to UTC, and second relate your audience time zone to it. But what happens in practice is that you quickly learn what times in your local time zone correspond to movements of the day in your peer time zones. And because everybody has the same mental model, it’s easier (and less error prone) to just to use local time zones.

Our team has members in every US timezone.

I find I'll often try and use relative times in conversation, e.g. "after the stand-up" or "at the top of the hour" rather than specifying a wall clock time.

I agree for simple cases like this.

But the more timezones the participants are in, the harder this approach gets.

I'm actually surprised more chat programs don't automatically "internationalize and localize" dates. Seems the same effort they put into spotting a username could look for dates in the user's locale, and then render it in the appropriate one everywhere. We'd need some conventions to indicate it should not change the date, maybe. Most uses would probably be fine with not having that.

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