[lolc]

Few people appreciate the difference between timezones and their UTC offset at a given date. That's because it's very unattractive to learn about DST. Without that, timezone offsets are relatively stable and it wouldn't matter (in the short term) which one you'd work with.

I'm just glad I don't need to have the "DST" talk more often. It takes people a night of sleep to process the level of time fuckery that is DST. Code reviews get delayed for a day when this happens. So yeah, when somebody refers to EST when they mean EDT I wouldn't give them "the talk". It works because people know what is meant.

Just a few days ago I had the understandable reaction of "what do you mean this won't work in India?"

[greggyb]

I steer into the skid. I've acquired several clients by giving talks on implementing time intelligence on several analytics platforms.

More often I deal with fiscal calendars, rather than DST issues. The thing it takes them some time to realize is that their attempts to use date functions built around the standard calendar lead to huge pain when dealing with their weird fiscal calendar.