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by dyingkneepad 1107 days ago
How does this generate off-by-one errors? I am also part of a company with employees in pretty much every timezone, but when they create a meeting the meeting invitation is programmed with the correct timezone so in my Calendar it always shows what time the meeting is going to be for me. I never even have to think what timezone the organizer is...
2 comments

The off-by-one error occurs when you announce an event in Standard time but really mean Daylight time, or vice versa. While those local to the time zone will often automatically correct this mistake either consciously on unconsciously, those in other time zones (especially where Daylight time isn't used or is on a different schedule) will tend to rely on time conversion tools which will take a literal interpretation of the scheduled time and result in the person being an hour early or an hour late.
The fact that you have to announce timezones is already an error. If I need to schedule a meeting I don't need to select timezones, they're already selected from the timezone I'm part of. There's never room for error by "picking" the wrong thing, since there's nothing to pick. And if my system is programmed with the wrong timezone, then every single meeting will be off-by-N and my calendar will show the wrong time as "now". It would be impossible to miss such an error.

I think your company needs better tools to handle meetings.

It's the same at my company. Teams and Zoom both automatically schedule meetings in every attendees' own time zone. Maybe that person's company still does phone meetings or something.
We don't use any automatic scheduling with Zoom or Google Calendar. Management doesn't send invites to those meetings, they just publish the link on Slack and we have to figure out how to get it into our calendars.

Trust me, at least once I missed a meeting because I was late by an hour due to time zone confusion.