4 ms·
We are not going _ever_ to solve this politically. What about educating those who need to think in global time about the existence of UTC. This would let us us
by eggie 11y ago
We are not going _ever_ to solve this politically.
What about educating those who need to think in global time about the existence of UTC. This would let us use UTC for coordinating inter-TZ events.
As an example, say I'm in Tokyo and I've got to make a call with someone in California. I could suggest "my 17:00 (8:00 UTC)" and if this didn't work she could reply "Nah, I've got lunch then. What about my 11:00 (7:00 UTC)"? At the same time we clarify our local time (I remember that she eats at my 5PM) and also the absolute time (8:00 UTC vs 7:00 UTC).
I've done this some, and it works. Where it falls down is practice. We simply aren't used to doing it, but we will learn out of necessity.
Instead of implementing a global time zone, let's just learn to use the one we already have as a common language to describe times. This is a distributed, bottom-up solution to a distributed problem.
- natrius 11y agoAgreed. This movement should be replaced with a movement for remote teams to use UTC as their reference time. Right now, we use headquarters time, but less than a third of the company works there, and no one in the other 2/3rds of the company is used to translating to that time zone. Every programmer has some experience translating to UTC, and if we make it the standard for remote teams, everyone will get used to it. Fewer mistakes will be made.
- Symbiote 11y agoDoes the average American know their UTC offset? I ask as I doubt the average British person would know, and it's zero for part of the year, and +1 for the summer. But Americans have multiple time zones in their country, and we don't.
- dottedmag 11y agoDoesn't it already happen in any sane distributed team?