3 ms·
Different parts of the world are at different times of day, that complexity doesn't disappear if you ignore it. The more distributed your team is, the more impo
by maxbond 1y ago
Different parts of the world are at different times of day, that complexity doesn't disappear if you ignore it. The more distributed your team is, the more important this becomes. People keep saying timezones only exist because of inertia, but I do not buy it. There's definitely complexity caused by political boundaries that isn't inherent to the problem, but the primary reason timezones exist isn't inertia, it's that they continue to be relevant and useful. Because people continue to keep hours based on their local conditions. I'm skeptical that the juice is worth the squeeze as far as eliminating the small overhead caused by political boundaries.
3 hours is one thing, 12 hours is another (and "So you want to abolish timezones" notes that people in China commonly use lookup tables, creating implicit timezones).
When I coordinate across timezones, I say, "Hey does 9amPT/11amET work?" (Assuming those are the relevant timezones). I don't see the problem with that approach?
Let's say you abolish timezones. Okay. How do I know whether it's rude to call Uncle Steve in Melbourne? I'm going to consult some kind of table and implicitly reintroduce timezones, right?
- fastball 1y agoBecause timezones require conversion/coordination by either you or the other party every time. Conversely learning when your Australian co-worker or uncle gets off work (in UTC) must only be done once. e.g. You learn that Uncle Steve in Melbourne gets off work around 07:00 UTC. So a reasonable time to call him and chat about life is 08:00 UTC. You text him and say "hey, long time no chat, want to catch up at 08:00?". He doesn't have to look anything up because he is also using UTC (or whatever). He says "actually I have a dinner thing, what about 11:00 instead?". Know confusion can be created, because this is the same time frame of reference for you too.
- maxbond 1y agoYep, you have to be explicit when coordinating across timezones. I never say "how about 11" in that context, I say "how about 11ET." If you want to do that by using UTC as a lingua franca and everyone does their own conversion, that makes a lot of sense. If you want to abolish timezones, that's just brushing the problem under the rug. People keeping different hours in different locales is inherent complexity. This is the crux of it. If you want to abolish timezones, you need to explain why it isn't a problem that people keep different hours in different locales. If you can't, then it boils down to timezones being annoying. They are annoying, but that's not sufficient reason to eliminate them.
- wpm 1y agoCouldn’t I just learn that Uncle Steve gets off work at 01:00 CST, by figuring out his offset from UTC and combining it with mine? Your solution doesn’t change that I have to figure out some “how many hours different is Uncle Steve”, just that somehow I’ll magically figure that out without using the simple UTC offsets we use to denote those differences now. It just papers over them.
- fastball 1y agoBoth scenarios require learning, only one scenario requires constant back-and-forth conversion, which in turn introduces opportunities for mistakes and confusion. Here is another example: I schedule a meeting with my co-worker in London. I say "how about 10am your time?" This is because I know he is X hours behind my timezone because I've learned that fact. He agrees and I show up an hour late because I forgot about DST and that he is only X-1 hours behind now. If we both coordinated around UTC, he would've said "actually 11 is better for me" and I would've showed up an hour earlier.