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Comment by jedberg | Hacker News Reader

Actually, back then, 18 years ago, most people expected your servers to be in Pacific or Eastern time, depends on where your company was headquartered, because none of us really had global technical workforces back then. We all pretty much worked in one office and used the local time zone, because often our servers were in the building with us or in a datacenter nearby.

Case in point, before reddit I was at eBay, and we kept all those servers in Pacific time, since the entire technical workforce was in Pacific time, as well as all of the servers.

Making blanket statements like that without considering the context of the time is usually not a good idea. ;)

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> most people expected your servers to be in Pacific or Eastern time

I was there back then, working for shops people have heard of, and I honestly don't know where you're getting this idea from. Some places did things wild and wacky when they were wee small, but most of us quickly learned that such shenanigans (like fun server naming conventions) start to fall apart and maybe we should do things differently.

Using UTC for servers was standard when I entered the field in 2005.

I was setting them to UTC in 1995.

Ah you think UTC is your ally? You merely adopted UTC. I was born in it, molded by it. I didn't see DST until I was already a man, by then it was nothing to me but blinding!

In the 1980s, PT and ET were common. I was working at Bell Labs then, and one of my jobs was to change the time zone (back then it was two words) on the testing machines, as needed. This is stuck in my memory since to change the timezone, you needed to edit the Unix kernel source code and recompile it!

2000 for me. That was the first time I had users from outside my own time zone, so I figured it was better to just use UTC for everything and just convert depending on the user's settings. I think I just applied the thinking to the whole server.

This is the way.

Yelp servers were set to Pacific time when I started in 2009, probably a decision from 2004

I run into this a lot when working with legacy code. The first reaction most teams have is to mock it, not understand it.

Everybody's dunking on you here but yeah, circa 18 years ago I remember that setting servers to local time was still pretty common.

It only matters if the servers were running cron jobs where it mattered if they ran "not at all or 2x."

Logs with weird dates on high demand production servers... less important.

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