11 ms·

Show HN: I made a site to tell the time in corporate

392 points by steadycourse 2y ago

FrustratedMonky 2y ago
Please add how many lunches are left. And how much time spent figuring out where to go to lunch.
- prerok 2y ago
  Time is an illusion. Lunch time doubly so.
codingdave 2y ago
Are you aware that not all corporations follow the calendar year?
- steadycourse 2y ago
  Of course - no doubt there are many schemes! I have found this to be by far the most common
  - cj 2y ago
    A quick Google shows 65% of public companies use calendar year as their FY. 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).
    - Raed667 2y ago
      Same.. This is my personal hell
      - lmkg 2y ago
        At least you're using the actual months. I've recently had to deal with 4-5-4 Retail Calendars. Explaining to my coworkers why the data for September includes dates from both August and October, and that's Working As Intended.
  - deathanatos 2y ago
    I can't remember the last time I worked at a corporation that used the actual Gregorian calendar. 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.
    - shagie 2y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar > 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?
- iancmceachern 2y ago
  I've always been curious about folks who use this phrasing and tone. "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?
  - codingdave 2y ago
    You could take it at face value. I have no idea if this was a 15 minute off-the-cuff effort, or a larger researched project. Rather than assume they either did or did not know, I asked. If they knew, they can explain their choice more. If they did not, they have something new to look into. If you are taking it as condescending, that is on you. It was simply a question.
    - BoredPositron 2y ago
      Even if someone didn't find your initial comment condescending, they likely would find this one to be so.
    - mmooss 2y ago
      > If you are taking it as condescending, that is on you. 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.
    - jrockway 2y ago
      The best way to look at it is that "are you aware" is always condescending. There are two answers; yes and no. If they say yes, they have to apologize for not adding your feature. If they say no, you're calling them ignorant. There isn't an out that deescalates and reduces the toxicity, so you're forcing everyone to now be as rude as you. 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.
- nottorp 2y ago
  For advanced features the enterprise edition of this site is available. Call our sales team to discuss a solution that will meet your needs.
  - jrockway 2y ago
    I would like to integrate with 30 bespoke SSO providers; is that something that I could be charged $100/user/month for after spending 8 hours of my time in some Zoom calls with people that aren't sure?
    - nottorp 2y ago
      100/user/bespoke sso provider/month right? Plus the support contract and the 200% administrative fee.
- andai 2y ago
  s/Are you aware that/Btw,/
Unearned5161 2y ago
neat!
ggambetta 2y ago
Could be useful to have the number of working days left in the quarter (even an approximation of 5/7 would do).
- ibizaman 2y ago
  5 out of 7? I must say, this is a grading scale like no other I’ve seen before!
- ninju 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_of_Nine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_of_Nine
miki123211 2y ago
What I would add to this (perhaps below the fold): 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.
- saaaaaam 2y ago
  I think you’ve missed the point. This isn’t actually meant to be useful. It’s commentary on the inane nature of corporate milestones.
  - ozim 2y ago
    Yeah adding holidays totally missing the point - everyone knows there are no holidays until quarterly goals are met.
plumbees 2y ago
This is fun. Seems like you got several comments here trying to "improve" it's "usefulness". I like it as is, a piece of art on how corporate speak is unrealistically obtuse.
- jay-barronville 2y ago
  > I like it as is, a piece of art on how corporate speak is unrealistically obtuse. Definitely obtuse. Why unrealistic though?
- drewcoo 2y ago
  The "improve its usefulness" comments are totally inline with suits (execs) interacting with smellies (software) and make this even better.
- steadycourse 2y ago
  Thanks! It's only after this comment that I realised just how close corporate planning is to a parody of itself :)
woodpanel 2y ago
[flagged]
yapyap 2y ago
Rating this website, it’s perfect. I give it a perfect 5/7
- corytheboyd 2y ago
  Which is exactly the number of days a week you plebs will work, and that is final.
  - collingreen 2y ago
    Only if the project is ahead of the "copy of pm-projQ1-gantchart.v2.final.xls", otherwise gear up for crunch time!
- anticorporate 2y ago
  That's too high. We all known perfection only merits a "meets expectations" review.
schainks 2y ago
Feature request: Please add an endpoint that is by stock ticker (e.g. "https://corporate.watch/AAPL https://corporate.watch/AAPL", as some companies do their financial reporting on a different calendar, and it would be nice to reference with respect to their "datetime zone".
- HenryBemis 2y ago
  Yeah some publicly traded companies have a different 'beginning of the year' but good luck with finding and making one for each (even with some elaborate on-the-fly scripting). I think the whole effort was to make a funny landing page that would prompt visitors to check the bread-maker objectivetrackr.
  - shawabawa3 2y ago
    But how long do I have before I need to hand in my deliverables at EOD??? This is going to push things back to NBD
  - encom 2y ago
    >r Are we really still doing the "-r" branding (brandr)? It is so tiresome.
  - soerxpso 2y ago
    It's reasonably easy to get that information from their SEC filings (for public companies), which are all in similar formats, if not exactly the same format. It wouldn't be as hard as you're implying.
    - schainks 2y ago
      Indeed, they even file with the SEC to say WHEN their system starts/ends every year. Investor relations website probably spells this out quite clearly, too.
    - HenryBemis 2y ago
      I do not imply that technical implementation is hard, they probably solved the problem even without AI, just have every step of the process (i.e. for every item going to employee 10 have red-amber-green buttons and red pushed back, yellow keeps but with deviations, green is perfect. And a flow would have all metrics. Some random QC/QA would verify and iron out issues. 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.
TheSmoke 2y ago
every week I search at least once “which week is it” — kudos :)
- hashmush 2y ago
  Uhm? The site doesn't show what week it is..? It's currently week 9 of 2025, but the site shows W7 of Q1. (Maybe that's what you meant? Searching for the current week in the quarter?)
  - TheSmoke 2y ago
    oh, I was being subtle since everyone was asking for a feature request.
- Symbiote 2y ago
  KDE and Microsoft Outlook allow you to add the ISO or American week number to the calendar. Probably other software has this icon
saaaaaam 2y ago
Love this. It could look more awful-corporate though.
corytheboyd 2y ago
I lose a little more will to live each time someone smugly reminds us that the fiscal year actually started in February or whatever the fuck. God dammit can we just have one CALENDAR. It’s okay I know you need to close the finances or whatever, but why can’t that just end in January and start again in February, instead of creating this dumb second year for ourselves. 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!!!
- rswail 2y ago
  Financial budgets work on financial years, so the money to pay you is driven by that. 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.
staindk 2y ago
Not really relevant but somehow this reminded me of https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Valve_Time https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Valve_Time
shagie 2y ago
> ... each quarter is ~13 weeks ... 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 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).
- madcaptenor 2y ago
  They would have had to add a leap week every five or six years to keep that in sync with the normal calendar - did they do that, or did they just let the calendar drift?
  - shagie 2y ago
    It's been... almost 20 years since I looked at that. 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.netapp.com/investor-faqs https://web.archive.org/web/20180626150216/https://investors... 2019-20: https://web.archive.org/web/20200430103748/http://investors.netapp.com/investor-faqs https://web.archive.org/web/20200430103748/http://investors.... 2021-22: https://web.archive.org/web/20210802092405/https://investors.netapp.com/investor-faqs https://web.archive.org/web/20210802092405/https://investors... 2022-23: https://web.archive.org/web/20221001020458/https://investors.netapp.com/investor-faqs https://web.archive.org/web/20221001020458/https://investors... 2023-24: https://web.archive.org/web/20230607023812/https://investors.netapp.com/investor-faqs 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.
mattas 2y ago
I really like this. As easy as it is to be cynical about corporate-speak, I find that it's sometimes actually useful (except for the whole touching base and circling back jargon). Questions. When do weeks start? On Saturdays or Sundays? How do you account for partial weeks at the beginning/end of years?
- efdee 2y ago
  I would understand someone asking if the week starts on Sunday or Monday, but I honest to God did not know some people start their week on Saturday.
  - 9dev 2y ago
    Just an off by one error on OPs part, I guess
    - mattas 2y ago
      Can confirm. I got the weekend confused.
  - Symbiote 2y ago
    Muslims, and therefore many countries in the Middle East and North Africa.
  - froindt 2y ago
    I've seen Saturday for payroll week start. It naturally makes sense to align other business calendars accordingly. 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.
- fweimer 2y ago
  ISO 8601 covers that. Weeks start on Mondays. The first week of the year has January 4th in it, which means that it sometimes starts on a Monday in the previous Gregorian year. This is why strftime has separate format specifiers for ISO year and ISO week year, %Y and %G: https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/strftime.3.html#NOTES https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/strftime.3.html#NO...
thih9 2y ago
The ui is not lotus notes[1] enough. Still great. [1]: or jira, sharepoint, salesforce, google docs, etc
numbers 2y ago
to really amp it to corpo-speak, you should use the Severance styling, they've done a great job really taking out the personality from any of their design. feels very dystopian + peak corporate!
ecolonsmak 2y ago
Should add how many working hours are left in the given quarter.
- collingreen 2y ago
  Translated to story points
  - OptionOfT 2y ago
    Paired with a burn rate, assuming people work 20 hours per day, don't take PTO and don't get sick. Management approved of the solution, and based on our data your can have it done by ... next week. Can you show the MVP?
- throwaway02341 2y ago
  Does it include unpaid hours checking mail and slack at home?
MortyWaves 2y ago
Unsure if this is either meant to be funny and cringe or a cry for help. I can see it being either. There is something awful about corpogarbage speak.
- pbronez 2y ago
  Its content marking for a metrics tracker / project management tool https://objectivetrackr.com/?utm_source=corporatewatch&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=corporatewatchlanding https://objectivetrackr.com/?utm_source=corporatewatch&utm_m...
  - BaudouinVH 2y ago
    It sounds like a marketing guerilla tactic rather than a funny web site.
lokimedes 2y ago
Our corpo year starts May 1. 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.
- lokimedes 2y ago
  My boss tells me we need it in Comic Sans for the next meeting with our board of directors. Thank you.
  - collingreen 2y ago
    Hello!? No response yet is this project dead or something it has been 30 minutes since the last question. This is very important to a major customer project of ours please get on this.
    - bastijn 2y ago
      It has come to our attention that an unlicensed tool has been used in the workplace. Please be advised that the use of unlicensed software is strictly prohibited, as it may pose significant legal, security, and compliance risks to the company. Effective immediately, any further use of this tool must cease. Failure to comply may result in disciplinary action, up to and including termination, in accordance with company policy. If you have any questions or require guidance on approved software tools, please contact IT or Compliance.
      - LASR 2y ago
        When will this tool have SOC compliance and SSO support? The devs on this must be sleeping. F for not paying attention to your users’ needs.
        doubled112 2y ago
        Please be advised that SSO is on the roadmap and will only be available in the Premium Plus Enterprise for Corporations edition.
icameron 2y ago
You know what is really wild and caused a few bugs in corporate reporting apps? Every 5 or 6 years you need to account for a 14 week quarter. 13 * 7 is 364 so four 13 week quarters will not add up to a calendar year.
- froindt 2y ago
  6-week December threw off a bunch of reporting last year for my company. The reporting group was not aware of the 6-week fiscal month, and the date dimension table didn't reflect it. Thankfully no particular harm was caused by it.
  - sureIy 2y ago
    If it were in Europe you could have just taken a couple of weeks off work.
airstrike 2y ago
Why stop at different fiscal years? We need companies with different fiscal calendars entirely. Lots of great announcements planned for our Q2 FY 44009 earnings call!
throwaway02341 2y ago
It's missing H1 / H2 :-) 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...
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
claytoncorreia 2y ago
You could add how many "selling days" are left in the quarter (mon-fri minus holidays).
mongol 2y ago
I prefer the Swedish site vecka.nu (meaning week.now)
- andai 2y ago
  Thanks. This is way better than my current solution, searching "[current_year] week calendar" on Google Images.
  - Symbiote 2y ago
    I changed the default date format of our internal company home page so instead of "25 February 2025” it reads "Tue week 9, 25 February"
WesSouza 2y ago
But what about the fiscal year?!
warkdarrior 2y ago
How am I supposed to integrate this into our company infra? No observability hooks, no load balancing support, no enterprise auth, no RBAC. Lame!
asalahli 2y ago
All that's missing is a "Happy [day-of-the-week]!" greeting
aussiedude 2y ago
Where are the AI features?
- megadata 2y ago
  We're waiting for approval.
yitchelle 2y ago
Based on previous discussions during a review with higher ups, there need to be some options as to how the week numbers are counted. Can you action that by KW10.3 and report back. I will create a JIRA ticket for tracking. Many thanks for your support.
- megadata 2y ago
  Sorry, Jira is a bit slow today.
drewcoo 2y ago
I did not expect that. I expected this to be about promises and sales and contracts. So it actually made me laugh.
fhennig 2y ago
I like it! I recently got quite interested into different ways of looking at the "seasonality" of the year, financial quarters are definitely also a way to look at it. 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/ https://solarcalendar.earth/
flkiwi 2y ago
I was expecting something much dumber than this. I don't mean the idea or the execution. I mean what was being executed. If someone tells me they're going to tell the time "in corporate", I'm expecting inefficiency masquerading as management, inscrutable abbreviations, divisional infighting, at least one personality profile tool, teambuilding, and an astonishing use of passive voice. I was genuinely excited to see how that would translate to a clock.
analog31 2y ago
Please add Time Until Lunch.
Terretta 2y ago
Now add business day (BD #) for financial services… in the visitor's country. Sounds easy, right? Just something like: https://aakashkh.github.io/python/2019/05/30/Business-Days-Custom-Holidays.html 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-Breakdown--Its-Significance-to-Value-Date-Timing.html https://fastercapital.com/content/Business-Day--Business-Day...
mhh__ 2y ago
OK but where is the speaking clock but for msft teams.
wodenokoto 2y ago
This is really useful! I know the thing was made ironically, but this is unironically useful. How do I add it as a widget next to my calendar on my iPhone, Mac and PC?
cperciva 2y ago
Ok, I know this is a joke, but... in all seriousness, I recently moved FreeBSD releases to a quarterly calendar. The first month of the quarter, people are encouraged to finish up their works in progress and get them into the tree; the second month, we have BETA/RC builds every week; and in the third month (usually at the start but not always) I do the final RELEASE build. 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.
- steadycourse 2y ago
  hey, author here - I want to get on record that I don't think this is silly at all. I think there is something truthful and useful in dividing and conquering time, it's just that generally the bar is so low right now and we should do better!
dudus 2y ago
Our Fiscal Year starts in October but one of a subsidiaries start in March which means we're often in different fiscal years. Make sure to account for that. We need to translate between real dates to fiscal dates all the time.
alanh 2y ago
Is it supposed to look like a Microsoft Word document from 1996? It’s all Times New Roman with 16-bit color highlights.
gideonparanoid 2y ago
First time I've encountered a site blocked by the work firewall, funnily enough.
- tobyhinloopen 2y ago
  I'm at home and it is blocked. Very interesting
- hcaz 2y ago
  My work blocks any domains registered in the last 90 days which is a big pain in the ass
phlillip 2y ago
I like this, I built something far less accurate... https://clockish.co.uk/ https://clockish.co.uk/
keybored 2y ago
I think the watch should randomly show the time in either quarters or tertiles. Gotta have both.
Snoddas 2y ago
This calendar is what we work after 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)
berkes 2y ago
It's very unrealistic. There aren't any OIDC and other authentication flows that involve at least five redirects and intermediate login screens. Nor are there any T&C and data processing dialogs. I'd expect at least one "this only works on that very old version of edge/IE" error. And it should have at least three different brands and logos hacked in, in order to be close to be a realistic corporate service. /s
silvestrov 2y ago
What type of week numbers is this? US? There are multiple different numbering systems for week numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Week#Numbering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Week#Numbering
eurekin 2y ago
> CloudFlare Content Blocked > This has been blocked due to the DNS Default Deny [CONTENT CATEGORIES] rule I'm seriously considering reporting the site, as blocked in error.
otobrglez 2y ago
It's nice. But. Where is Q5? Our CEO said we need one.
dirkc 2y ago
I was really hoping that the link at the bottom was further trolling corporate disfunction
siva7 2y ago
.watch is blocked by my corporate firewall. please use .com
- extua 2y ago
  Same here, I get a scary looking page from Cloudflare Gateway saying "Access to this site has been blocked by the Protective DNS Service".
- sureIy 2y ago
  .watch is blocked by your corporate firewall. please complain about mindless limitations to corporate
InDubioProRubio 2y ago
If deadlines start at a 2 week sprint and compress logarthimically over the span of a year, we are now at deadline 5.
Giorgi 2y ago
What about business days? Are you going to leave me at mere the "calendar days" like a Plebe
iefbr14 2y ago
It would be nice if it had a graph with some arrows in it.
sarabande 2y ago
Can you add calendar week and fiscal year start
king_magic 2y ago
I love when something like this pops up. Crazy useful, like the various UTC conversion web apps out there.
volkadav 2y ago
having this open in another tab adds just the right soundtrack: http://conferencecall.biz/ http://conferencecall.biz/ ;)
KaiserPro 2y ago
Raw unstyled HTML, In this economy? Fuckyeah.
gergely 2y ago
It painfully misses that "there are 5 weeks left" because I have to calculate it. I don't care how much have gone, all I care how much is left!
jsolson 2y ago
Love it, but it needs an icon so I can install it as a PWA. Oh, and can I get the icon in corn-flower blue?
neom 2y ago
I was pretty sure I was the only person who had one of these, but I guess not... I also built something like this: https://ascent.ca/fos/qs.html https://ascent.ca/fos/qs.html
mindcrash 2y ago
Calendar days are meaningless in corporate. Better state workdays (or best of both worlds: mention # of calendar days and # of actual workdays)
itcrowd 2y ago
A funny idea but I think it is wrong(?) 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)
ttctciyf 2y ago
Might want to add a disclaimer in view of https://corporatewatch.org/ https://corporatewatch.org/ ("Corporate-critical news and research since 1996")
INTPenis 2y ago
We learned in school to use week numbers in Sweden. I never realized the rest of the world didn't use it. There is even this notorious website here called vecka.nu that just tells you the current week.
BrandoElFollito 2y ago
I cannot read these fucking comments, they create some kind of anxiety about the fact that I thought to be the only one having to listen to this crap at work and now I see that the world is simply doomed.
- steadycourse 2y ago
  Hey, it's not doomed. I created objectivetrackr.com (the link at the bottom) because I think we can fix corporate planning comedy!
uladzislau 2y ago
Why it’s so ugly? Can you style it a bit? It’s not like 80’s anymore.

392 points by steadycourse 2y ago

FrustratedMonky 2y ago

Please add how many lunches are left. And how much time spent figuring out where to go to lunch.

prerok 2y ago
Time is an illusion. Lunch time doubly so.

codingdave 2y ago

Are you aware that not all corporations follow the calendar year?

steadycourse 2y ago
Of course - no doubt there are many schemes! I have found this to be by far the most common
- cj 2y ago
  A quick Google shows 65% of public companies use calendar year as their FY. 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).
  - Raed667 2y ago
    Same.. This is my personal hell
    - lmkg 2y ago
      At least you're using the actual months. I've recently had to deal with 4-5-4 Retail Calendars. Explaining to my coworkers why the data for September includes dates from both August and October, and that's Working As Intended.
- deathanatos 2y ago
  I can't remember the last time I worked at a corporation that used the actual Gregorian calendar. 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.
  - shagie 2y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar > 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?
iancmceachern 2y ago
I've always been curious about folks who use this phrasing and tone. "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?
- codingdave 2y ago
  You could take it at face value. I have no idea if this was a 15 minute off-the-cuff effort, or a larger researched project. Rather than assume they either did or did not know, I asked. If they knew, they can explain their choice more. If they did not, they have something new to look into. If you are taking it as condescending, that is on you. It was simply a question.
  - BoredPositron 2y ago
    Even if someone didn't find your initial comment condescending, they likely would find this one to be so.
  - mmooss 2y ago
    > If you are taking it as condescending, that is on you. 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.
  - jrockway 2y ago
    The best way to look at it is that "are you aware" is always condescending. There are two answers; yes and no. If they say yes, they have to apologize for not adding your feature. If they say no, you're calling them ignorant. There isn't an out that deescalates and reduces the toxicity, so you're forcing everyone to now be as rude as you. 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.
nottorp 2y ago
For advanced features the enterprise edition of this site is available. Call our sales team to discuss a solution that will meet your needs.
- jrockway 2y ago
  I would like to integrate with 30 bespoke SSO providers; is that something that I could be charged $100/user/month for after spending 8 hours of my time in some Zoom calls with people that aren't sure?
  - nottorp 2y ago
    100/user/bespoke sso provider/month right? Plus the support contract and the 200% administrative fee.
andai 2y ago
s/Are you aware that/Btw,/

Unearned5161 2y ago

neat!

ggambetta 2y ago

Could be useful to have the number of working days left in the quarter (even an approximation of 5/7 would do).

ibizaman 2y ago
5 out of 7? I must say, this is a grading scale like no other I’ve seen before!
ninju 2y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_of_Nine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_of_Nine

miki123211 2y ago

What I would add to this (perhaps below the fold): 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.

saaaaaam 2y ago
I think you’ve missed the point. This isn’t actually meant to be useful. It’s commentary on the inane nature of corporate milestones.
- ozim 2y ago
  Yeah adding holidays totally missing the point - everyone knows there are no holidays until quarterly goals are met.

plumbees 2y ago

This is fun. Seems like you got several comments here trying to "improve" it's "usefulness". I like it as is, a piece of art on how corporate speak is unrealistically obtuse.

jay-barronville 2y ago
> I like it as is, a piece of art on how corporate speak is unrealistically obtuse. Definitely obtuse. Why unrealistic though?
drewcoo 2y ago
The "improve its usefulness" comments are totally inline with suits (execs) interacting with smellies (software) and make this even better.
steadycourse 2y ago
Thanks! It's only after this comment that I realised just how close corporate planning is to a parody of itself :)

woodpanel 2y ago

[flagged]

yapyap 2y ago

Rating this website, it’s perfect. I give it a perfect 5/7

corytheboyd 2y ago
Which is exactly the number of days a week you plebs will work, and that is final.
- collingreen 2y ago
  Only if the project is ahead of the "copy of pm-projQ1-gantchart.v2.final.xls", otherwise gear up for crunch time!
anticorporate 2y ago
That's too high. We all known perfection only merits a "meets expectations" review.

schainks 2y ago

Feature request: Please add an endpoint that is by stock ticker (e.g. "https://corporate.watch/AAPL https://corporate.watch/AAPL", as some companies do their financial reporting on a different calendar, and it would be nice to reference with respect to their "datetime zone".

HenryBemis 2y ago
Yeah some publicly traded companies have a different 'beginning of the year' but good luck with finding and making one for each (even with some elaborate on-the-fly scripting). I think the whole effort was to make a funny landing page that would prompt visitors to check the bread-maker objectivetrackr.
- shawabawa3 2y ago
  But how long do I have before I need to hand in my deliverables at EOD??? This is going to push things back to NBD
- encom 2y ago
  >r Are we really still doing the "-r" branding (brandr)? It is so tiresome.
- soerxpso 2y ago
  It's reasonably easy to get that information from their SEC filings (for public companies), which are all in similar formats, if not exactly the same format. It wouldn't be as hard as you're implying.
  - schainks 2y ago
    Indeed, they even file with the SEC to say WHEN their system starts/ends every year. Investor relations website probably spells this out quite clearly, too.
  - HenryBemis 2y ago
    I do not imply that technical implementation is hard, they probably solved the problem even without AI, just have every step of the process (i.e. for every item going to employee 10 have red-amber-green buttons and red pushed back, yellow keeps but with deviations, green is perfect. And a flow would have all metrics. Some random QC/QA would verify and iron out issues. 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.

TheSmoke 2y ago

every week I search at least once “which week is it” — kudos :)

hashmush 2y ago
Uhm? The site doesn't show what week it is..? It's currently week 9 of 2025, but the site shows W7 of Q1. (Maybe that's what you meant? Searching for the current week in the quarter?)
- TheSmoke 2y ago
  oh, I was being subtle since everyone was asking for a feature request.
Symbiote 2y ago
KDE and Microsoft Outlook allow you to add the ISO or American week number to the calendar. Probably other software has this icon

saaaaaam 2y ago

Love this. It could look more awful-corporate though.

corytheboyd 2y ago

I lose a little more will to live each time someone smugly reminds us that the fiscal year actually started in February or whatever the fuck. God dammit can we just have one CALENDAR. It’s okay I know you need to close the finances or whatever, but why can’t that just end in January and start again in February, instead of creating this dumb second year for ourselves. 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!!!

rswail 2y ago
Financial budgets work on financial years, so the money to pay you is driven by that. 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.

staindk 2y ago

Not really relevant but somehow this reminded me of https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Valve_Time https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Valve_Time

shagie 2y ago

> ... each quarter is ~13 weeks ... 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 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).

madcaptenor 2y ago
They would have had to add a leap week every five or six years to keep that in sync with the normal calendar - did they do that, or did they just let the calendar drift?
- shagie 2y ago
  It's been... almost 20 years since I looked at that. 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.netapp.com/investor-faqs https://web.archive.org/web/20180626150216/https://investors... 2019-20: https://web.archive.org/web/20200430103748/http://investors.netapp.com/investor-faqs https://web.archive.org/web/20200430103748/http://investors.... 2021-22: https://web.archive.org/web/20210802092405/https://investors.netapp.com/investor-faqs https://web.archive.org/web/20210802092405/https://investors... 2022-23: https://web.archive.org/web/20221001020458/https://investors.netapp.com/investor-faqs https://web.archive.org/web/20221001020458/https://investors... 2023-24: https://web.archive.org/web/20230607023812/https://investors.netapp.com/investor-faqs 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.

mattas 2y ago

I really like this. As easy as it is to be cynical about corporate-speak, I find that it's sometimes actually useful (except for the whole touching base and circling back jargon). Questions. When do weeks start? On Saturdays or Sundays? How do you account for partial weeks at the beginning/end of years?

efdee 2y ago
I would understand someone asking if the week starts on Sunday or Monday, but I honest to God did not know some people start their week on Saturday.
- 9dev 2y ago
  Just an off by one error on OPs part, I guess
  - mattas 2y ago
    Can confirm. I got the weekend confused.
- Symbiote 2y ago
  Muslims, and therefore many countries in the Middle East and North Africa.
- froindt 2y ago
  I've seen Saturday for payroll week start. It naturally makes sense to align other business calendars accordingly. 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.
fweimer 2y ago
ISO 8601 covers that. Weeks start on Mondays. The first week of the year has January 4th in it, which means that it sometimes starts on a Monday in the previous Gregorian year. This is why strftime has separate format specifiers for ISO year and ISO week year, %Y and %G: https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/strftime.3.html#NOTES https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/strftime.3.html#NO...

thih9 2y ago

The ui is not lotus notes[1] enough. Still great. [1]: or jira, sharepoint, salesforce, google docs, etc

numbers 2y ago

to really amp it to corpo-speak, you should use the Severance styling, they've done a great job really taking out the personality from any of their design. feels very dystopian + peak corporate!

ecolonsmak 2y ago

Should add how many working hours are left in the given quarter.

collingreen 2y ago
Translated to story points
- OptionOfT 2y ago
  Paired with a burn rate, assuming people work 20 hours per day, don't take PTO and don't get sick. Management approved of the solution, and based on our data your can have it done by ... next week. Can you show the MVP?
throwaway02341 2y ago
Does it include unpaid hours checking mail and slack at home?

MortyWaves 2y ago

Unsure if this is either meant to be funny and cringe or a cry for help. I can see it being either. There is something awful about corpogarbage speak.

pbronez 2y ago
Its content marking for a metrics tracker / project management tool https://objectivetrackr.com/?utm_source=corporatewatch&utm_medium=web&utm_campaign=corporatewatchlanding https://objectivetrackr.com/?utm_source=corporatewatch&utm_m...
- BaudouinVH 2y ago
  It sounds like a marketing guerilla tactic rather than a funny web site.

lokimedes 2y ago

Our corpo year starts May 1. 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.

lokimedes 2y ago
My boss tells me we need it in Comic Sans for the next meeting with our board of directors. Thank you.
- collingreen 2y ago
  Hello!? No response yet is this project dead or something it has been 30 minutes since the last question. This is very important to a major customer project of ours please get on this.
  - bastijn 2y ago
    It has come to our attention that an unlicensed tool has been used in the workplace. Please be advised that the use of unlicensed software is strictly prohibited, as it may pose significant legal, security, and compliance risks to the company. Effective immediately, any further use of this tool must cease. Failure to comply may result in disciplinary action, up to and including termination, in accordance with company policy. If you have any questions or require guidance on approved software tools, please contact IT or Compliance.
    - LASR 2y ago
      When will this tool have SOC compliance and SSO support? The devs on this must be sleeping. F for not paying attention to your users’ needs.
      - doubled112 2y ago
        Please be advised that SSO is on the roadmap and will only be available in the Premium Plus Enterprise for Corporations edition.

icameron 2y ago

You know what is really wild and caused a few bugs in corporate reporting apps? Every 5 or 6 years you need to account for a 14 week quarter. 13 * 7 is 364 so four 13 week quarters will not add up to a calendar year.

froindt 2y ago
6-week December threw off a bunch of reporting last year for my company. The reporting group was not aware of the 6-week fiscal month, and the date dimension table didn't reflect it. Thankfully no particular harm was caused by it.
- sureIy 2y ago
  If it were in Europe you could have just taken a couple of weeks off work.

airstrike 2y ago

Why stop at different fiscal years? We need companies with different fiscal calendars entirely. Lots of great announcements planned for our Q2 FY 44009 earnings call!

throwaway02341 2y ago

It's missing H1 / H2 :-) 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...

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

claytoncorreia 2y ago

You could add how many "selling days" are left in the quarter (mon-fri minus holidays).

mongol 2y ago

I prefer the Swedish site vecka.nu (meaning week.now)

andai 2y ago
Thanks. This is way better than my current solution, searching "[current_year] week calendar" on Google Images.
- Symbiote 2y ago
  I changed the default date format of our internal company home page so instead of "25 February 2025” it reads "Tue week 9, 25 February"

WesSouza 2y ago

But what about the fiscal year?!

warkdarrior 2y ago

How am I supposed to integrate this into our company infra? No observability hooks, no load balancing support, no enterprise auth, no RBAC. Lame!

asalahli 2y ago

All that's missing is a "Happy [day-of-the-week]!" greeting

aussiedude 2y ago

Where are the AI features?

megadata 2y ago
We're waiting for approval.

yitchelle 2y ago

Based on previous discussions during a review with higher ups, there need to be some options as to how the week numbers are counted. Can you action that by KW10.3 and report back. I will create a JIRA ticket for tracking. Many thanks for your support.

megadata 2y ago
Sorry, Jira is a bit slow today.

drewcoo 2y ago

I did not expect that. I expected this to be about promises and sales and contracts. So it actually made me laugh.

fhennig 2y ago

I like it! I recently got quite interested into different ways of looking at the "seasonality" of the year, financial quarters are definitely also a way to look at it. 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/ https://solarcalendar.earth/

flkiwi 2y ago

I was expecting something much dumber than this. I don't mean the idea or the execution. I mean what was being executed. If someone tells me they're going to tell the time "in corporate", I'm expecting inefficiency masquerading as management, inscrutable abbreviations, divisional infighting, at least one personality profile tool, teambuilding, and an astonishing use of passive voice. I was genuinely excited to see how that would translate to a clock.

analog31 2y ago

Please add Time Until Lunch.

Terretta 2y ago

Now add business day (BD #) for financial services… in the visitor's country. Sounds easy, right? Just something like: https://aakashkh.github.io/python/2019/05/30/Business-Days-Custom-Holidays.html 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-Breakdown--Its-Significance-to-Value-Date-Timing.html https://fastercapital.com/content/Business-Day--Business-Day...

mhh__ 2y ago

OK but where is the speaking clock but for msft teams.

wodenokoto 2y ago

This is really useful! I know the thing was made ironically, but this is unironically useful. How do I add it as a widget next to my calendar on my iPhone, Mac and PC?

cperciva 2y ago

Ok, I know this is a joke, but... in all seriousness, I recently moved FreeBSD releases to a quarterly calendar. The first month of the quarter, people are encouraged to finish up their works in progress and get them into the tree; the second month, we have BETA/RC builds every week; and in the third month (usually at the start but not always) I do the final RELEASE build. 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.

steadycourse 2y ago
hey, author here - I want to get on record that I don't think this is silly at all. I think there is something truthful and useful in dividing and conquering time, it's just that generally the bar is so low right now and we should do better!

dudus 2y ago

Our Fiscal Year starts in October but one of a subsidiaries start in March which means we're often in different fiscal years. Make sure to account for that. We need to translate between real dates to fiscal dates all the time.

alanh 2y ago

Is it supposed to look like a Microsoft Word document from 1996? It’s all Times New Roman with 16-bit color highlights.

gideonparanoid 2y ago

First time I've encountered a site blocked by the work firewall, funnily enough.

tobyhinloopen 2y ago
I'm at home and it is blocked. Very interesting
hcaz 2y ago
My work blocks any domains registered in the last 90 days which is a big pain in the ass

phlillip 2y ago

I like this, I built something far less accurate... https://clockish.co.uk/ https://clockish.co.uk/

keybored 2y ago

I think the watch should randomly show the time in either quarters or tertiles. Gotta have both.

Snoddas 2y ago

This calendar is what we work after 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)

berkes 2y ago

It's very unrealistic. There aren't any OIDC and other authentication flows that involve at least five redirects and intermediate login screens. Nor are there any T&C and data processing dialogs. I'd expect at least one "this only works on that very old version of edge/IE" error. And it should have at least three different brands and logos hacked in, in order to be close to be a realistic corporate service. /s

silvestrov 2y ago

What type of week numbers is this? US? There are multiple different numbering systems for week numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Week#Numbering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Week#Numbering

eurekin 2y ago

> CloudFlare Content Blocked > This has been blocked due to the DNS Default Deny [CONTENT CATEGORIES] rule I'm seriously considering reporting the site, as blocked in error.

otobrglez 2y ago

It's nice. But. Where is Q5? Our CEO said we need one.

dirkc 2y ago

I was really hoping that the link at the bottom was further trolling corporate disfunction

siva7 2y ago

.watch is blocked by my corporate firewall. please use .com

extua 2y ago
Same here, I get a scary looking page from Cloudflare Gateway saying "Access to this site has been blocked by the Protective DNS Service".
sureIy 2y ago
.watch is blocked by your corporate firewall. please complain about mindless limitations to corporate

InDubioProRubio 2y ago

If deadlines start at a 2 week sprint and compress logarthimically over the span of a year, we are now at deadline 5.

Giorgi 2y ago

What about business days? Are you going to leave me at mere the "calendar days" like a Plebe

iefbr14 2y ago

It would be nice if it had a graph with some arrows in it.

sarabande 2y ago

Can you add calendar week and fiscal year start

king_magic 2y ago

I love when something like this pops up. Crazy useful, like the various UTC conversion web apps out there.

volkadav 2y ago

having this open in another tab adds just the right soundtrack: http://conferencecall.biz/ http://conferencecall.biz/ ;)

KaiserPro 2y ago

Raw unstyled HTML, In this economy? Fuckyeah.

gergely 2y ago

It painfully misses that "there are 5 weeks left" because I have to calculate it. I don't care how much have gone, all I care how much is left!

jsolson 2y ago

Love it, but it needs an icon so I can install it as a PWA. Oh, and can I get the icon in corn-flower blue?

neom 2y ago

I was pretty sure I was the only person who had one of these, but I guess not... I also built something like this: https://ascent.ca/fos/qs.html https://ascent.ca/fos/qs.html

mindcrash 2y ago

Calendar days are meaningless in corporate. Better state workdays (or best of both worlds: mention # of calendar days and # of actual workdays)

itcrowd 2y ago

A funny idea but I think it is wrong(?) 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)

ttctciyf 2y ago

Might want to add a disclaimer in view of https://corporatewatch.org/ https://corporatewatch.org/ ("Corporate-critical news and research since 1996")

INTPenis 2y ago

We learned in school to use week numbers in Sweden. I never realized the rest of the world didn't use it. There is even this notorious website here called vecka.nu that just tells you the current week.

BrandoElFollito 2y ago

I cannot read these fucking comments, they create some kind of anxiety about the fact that I thought to be the only one having to listen to this crap at work and now I see that the world is simply doomed.

steadycourse 2y ago
Hey, it's not doomed. I created objectivetrackr.com (the link at the bottom) because I think we can fix corporate planning comedy!

uladzislau 2y ago

Why it’s so ugly? Can you style it a bit? It’s not like 80’s anymore.