Show HN: I made a site to tell the time in corporate
corporate.watch
corporate.watch
This wasn't for any corporatey reason though; it just happened that "every 3 months" is a natural cadence for doing releases. (In a sense it's a 6-month cadence, like e.g. Ubuntu, but we support two major versions at any given time, and their schedules interleave.)
Sometimes a calendar quarter is just a calendar quarter.
I think the whole effort was to make a funny landing page that would prompt visitors to check the bread-maker objectivetrackr.
This is going to push things back to NBD
Are we really still doing the "-r" branding (brandr)? It is so tiresome.
It is the "camera in my face 8h" that would get A LOT of attention by member state gov/labour ministry and definitely the EDPS would have a party on their corpses.
Please add an offset functionality to your free solution immediately, as it has now become a core component of our operation, or we will be forced to take legal action.
Also, we appreciate if you could sign a retroactive NDA with our legal team ASAP.
Thank you.
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This is really important so we'll need to do this at least twice a day
I think this was what font they used except they had it all connected , that is if I am typing "test" then t is connected to e and then s and then t , in probably the same font as that of Comfortaa.
(and if you're up for a rabbit hole, https://aresluna.org/the-hardest-working-font-in-manhattan/ )
Also, thank you for the "routed" tip. Your rabbit hole also mentions "monoline" and the MIL-SPEC-33558 font too.
I'd upvote you ten times if I could. Made my day.
Edit:nvm the option to write text is below , I didn't see it. Its kinda cool actually.
("Honey I got you that Cisco 4500 you always wanted...")
Whereas for anything consumer e-commerce, you'd want a calendar with variable/sliding dates (e.g. SuperBowl) but that at least keeps the above events in the same quarter YoY, consistently.
ISO week numbering is actually sort of neat, because instead of leap days it has entire leap weeks since the 400-year Gregorian cycle has a whole number of weeks in it, but for some reason they decided that a week's year is the Gregorian year in which the Thursday of that week occurs.
The old financial year started on 25th March, which was also new year's day (and also the point that the year incremented, so if you were knocking around on March 24th 1300 the next day would be March 25th 1301.
But when everyone changed to the Gregorian Calendar - which added 11 days to the calendar to make up for some sloppy Papal mathematicians who didn't believe in things like astronomy or leap years - the tax year had to be shifted to be April 6th, because while everyone else was happy to work around things, the tax office was NOT going to have a tax year that was 11 days shorter because that would have meant less money.
So basically, when the calendar changed happened, new year was set as 1st January (yawn, stupid time to have new year!) at which point the year count incremented up by one year, and the tax year stayed (and still stays) as April 6th, which was really March 25th but with some days tacked on.
1752 must have been a pretty confusing year.
No need to appreciate. Signing the retroactive NDA is a non negotiable.
Also, my legal team says your color choices aren't compliant with Section 508, so regrettably, we do have to take legal action.
Edit: EMEA has questions I couldn't answer about GDPR, PII & data governance. Can you please hope on a quick call to see if they also want to sue you?
Definitely obtuse. Why unrealistic though?
When I worked at Network Appliance (Q1 earnings call is August 27th), they used a strict 4-4-5 calendar. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4–4–5_calendar
This meant that it wasn't "about" 13 weeks for each quarter, the quarter was defined as 13 weeks (91 days).
I believe that it had a slightly floating start date.
NetApp fiscal quarters are:
Quarter Three: October 28, 2024 through January 24, 2025
Quarter Four: January 28, 2025 through April 25, 2025
Quarter One: April 28, 2025 through July 25, 2025
Quarter Two: July 27, 2024 through October 23, 2025
And from Wayback (adjusted to fit same ordering) Quarter Three: October 29, 2018 through January 27, 2019
Quarter Four: January 28, 2019 through April 26, 2019
Quarter One: April 30, 2018 through July 27, 2018
Quarter Two: July 30, 2018 through October 26, 2018
2018-19: https://web.archive.org/web/20180626150216/https://investors...2019-20: https://web.archive.org/web/20200430103748/http://investors....
2021-22: https://web.archive.org/web/20210802092405/https://investors...
2022-23: https://web.archive.org/web/20221001020458/https://investors...
2023-24: https://web.archive.org/web/20230607023812/https://investors...
It appears that it floats a little bit.
I remember the 4-4-5 from back then (started in '98, was laid off in '09) because we had the old style BIG releases where it was a weekend of things changing (and that was ok). The last weekend of the first month was infrastructure major changes, the last weekend of the second month was software major changes, and the last two weeks of the third month were hard frozen for accounting to not have changes.
Apparently financial analysts are (or were) surprised when that extra week leads to corresponding changes for other metrics: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01654...
Thankfully no particular harm was caused by it.
Sounds easy, right? Just something like:
https://aakashkh.github.io/python/2019/05/30/Business-Days-C...
But then a wild Holiday appears:
https://fastercapital.com/content/Business-Day--Business-Day...
Questions. When do weeks start? On Saturdays or Sundays? How do you account for partial weeks at the beginning/end of years?
It does get funky with overtime. If weather cancels a Monday-Friday shift, you might schedule a makeup shift on Saturday. What would typically be straight time in the same pay period is now going to cause overtime in the following week.
It's juuuust close enough to ISO8601 where with a bit of forethought everything could have been easy.
There are multiple different numbering systems for week numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Week#Numbering
There is something awful about corpogarbage speak.
[1]: or jira, sharepoint, salesforce, google docs, etc
1. The current time in a few major cities around the world (NYC, SFO, London, CET, Mumbai and Beijing come to mind), with an indication of where it's working day (which is not 9 to 5 everywhere). Particular emphasis should be put on timezones that just started and ended daylight saving (EU and US aren't synchronized on this).
2. Upcoming holidays in major world countries.
3. Info about which fiscal year it is and when that's going to change.
You could probably get Claude to build you an artifact for this in 5 minutes though.
And how much time spent figuring out where to go to lunch.
It could look more awful-corporate though.
I really like looking at the way the sun defines stuff, I made a similar website for how long until the next solstice etc. https://solarcalendar.earth/
I also built something like this: https://ascent.ca/fos/qs.html
You know what it is? A leaky abstraction. Implementation details of finance leaking into something as fundamentally basic as the calendar for the entire rest of the company. NO!!!
Of course, the budgeting year could be different to the financial year, but for the execs that are compensated by financial targets, they need to be able to align.
So basically, the rest of the company has no choice.
I actually encountered T1 in a company presentation once. I thought they were joking, but it's apparently a thing also. I guess it hits the sweet spot between a half year and a quarter...
There is even this notorious website here called vecka.nu that just tells you the current week.
The site suggests it is "7 weeks into 2025" but as of today (Feb 25th, 2025) we are in week 9 (according to MS Outlook calendar at work)
I'm seriously considering reporting the site, as blocked in error.
Management approved of the solution, and based on our data your can have it done by ... next week. Can you show the MVP?
Probably other software has this icon
A useful addition would be to show weekdays/weekends with a localization option for holidays (Here in Sweden we have 5 days off this Q2)
How do I add it as a widget next to my calendar on my iPhone, Mac and PC?
Lots of great announcements planned for our Q2 FY 44009 earnings call!
I give it a perfect 5/7
We all known perfection only merits a "meets expectations" review.
Oh, and can I get the icon in corn-flower blue?
I expected this to be about promises and sales and contracts.
So it actually made me laugh.
Fuckyeah.
At our startup, it's even more complicated :) we use calendar year for official financial / business metrics, while our planning quarter is offset by 1 month (Q1 = Feb/Mar/Apr).
Most of the times it's some shadow-Greg calendar that's slightly out of phase. E.g., I think my 2025Q1 starts on 1 Mar? I've never been entirely sure.
Intel used some "work week" concept that I never figured out the rules for, in the entire time I worked there, beyond that it wasn't ISO weeks.
The spirit of the idea is neat, though, and I should build something like this internally but using whatever esocalendar we're using… then I'd be able to remember whether we're +1 mo, +2 mo, 1Y-1mo … or whatever … out of phase with normal people.
> The International Fixed Calendar divides the year into 13 months of 28 days each. A type of perennial calendar, every date is fixed to the same weekday every year. Though it was never officially adopted at the country level, the entrepreneur George Eastman instituted its use at the Eastman Kodak Company in 1928, where it was used until 1989.
Might it have been something along that line?
"Are you aware" always seems condescending to me. It's a weird assumption to make that because someone made a choice, that they weren't aware that there were other choices.
It's like walking up to someone who drives a Honda and saying "are you aware you could have bought a Ford?"
Please help me, us there another interpretation of this kind of phrasing?
If you are taking it as condescending, that is on you. It was simply a question.
Tone is an essential, unavoidable, yet undefineable thing. There's a geek fantasy that humans communicate logically and explicitly using only literal meanings of words, but the reality is that most human communication is in body language, tone, emotion, context, and more - and there's no way to define exactly how all those work or what they mean.
I got the same impression as the GP. I'm not always great at it myself but unless I make sure my tone conveys what I want it to convey, I'm rolling the dice.
Phrasing your statement like "my corporate year starts on November 15th; is there any way to offset the start of the year?" would sound nicer. If the author was aware of that and didn't add the feature, then they can say so. Or if they weren't aware, they can say "good idea". Now nobody has to get defensive and the heat of the conversation can generally decrease, keeping everyone happy and polite.
Maybe something like "This looks good. Would be nice to see it extended to support companies that do not follow the calendar year.".
I know this, because I have to self-correct my own communications because of the same or a similar problem (a bit on the autism spectrum).
Plus the support contract and the 200% administrative fee.