[ghshephard]

Great for Unix Log files, bad for pretty much everything else. I work in emerging markets, and in the last two weeks I've had conference calls in Brazil, Singapore, Australia, Luxembourg, Portugal, and the UK. Whenever I'm scheduling a call with any of these people, I need to know what time it is. For whatever reason - every company we deal with seems to work from 8:00sh (sometimes 9:00) to 5:00sh (sometime 6:00) - Likewise - they know the same about me.

Different time zones make it much easier to establish common meeting times with people around the world - even if it makes parsing log files a bitch.

That's why I recommend UTC for Log files from day one, but I'm happy to have Time Zone when working with people.

[Firehed]

UTC would eliminate the confusion - just say "We're in the office from 17:00-02:00" (currently 9-6 PST)

A nontrivial amount of my time is wasted responding to emails with "3pm pacific or mountain?". Asking "does 23:00 work for you?" avoids the variable.

This is twice as bad if you ever have to work with anyone in Arizona during the summer, as they already skip DST.

Fortunately calendaring software does a decent job abstracting the insanity away, but that doesn't help much with the process of scheduling things across companies, as you can't see their calendars. I suppose within a company that has offices in multiple timezones it's less painful.

[aneth4]

A more nontrivial amount of time would likely be wasted changing the time system of 7 billion people and every computer system.

I think learning to include time zones in emails to people in different time zones might be an easier solution.

[zanny]

Not at all, because we will always have to endure the costs of having a crappy time zone based time system, especially when we start moving into space, those time systems become absurdly antiquated.

The idea of changing time to match the sun is just completely obsolete. If every country just agreed to use UTC, besides some errant systems not easily recognized as depending on time zone based timekeeping, we could probably all be "over" the switch in a week, just like it takes a week for DST clock switchers to adjust to an hourly time change. I would propose that changing by more than an hour for various parts of the world won't have a larger effect than changing hours twice a year for DST, because the adjustment effect isn't because of the severity of the time change but because the change happened at all.

[aneth4]

I appreciate your optimism. You do know not everyone in the world is interested in, let alone willing to make such changes? I'd guess less than 1% would be. The cost would be in the hundreds of billions.

Meanwhile, try getting just the US to switch to the metric system....

As far as space goes, interstellar time is probably rather different than Earth based time. I suspect there will be a new system based loosely off of GMT. But that won't matter to most humans for at least 20 years, more likely 100.

[zanny]

We already pay billions to switch DST. We pay billions annually in wasted time converting time zones.

We also waste money on the Imperial Units, but that (like the UTC proposition) is short term pains for long term benefits, and nobody likes to think long term.

[aneth4]

You over-estimate people's appetite for change. Dropping DST is feasible and I agree with it. Converting to global UTC - not going to happen unless there is a compelling reason for your average folks, 99% of whom need to consider time zones a few times a year.

Besides, personally I think it would be much more difficult to deal with global UTC for most human activities and scheduling. It doesn't actually solve any problem. It makes some things easier and some things harder. Perhaps there would be a net benefit for some, but negative for others.

[ghshephard]

I'd rather not have to ask every company/partner what time they are in the office - assuming that 9:00 - 5:00 eliminates that step. And it's certainly much easier for me to remember what city a partner is in, than to track what UTC time periods they are in the office.

DST is yet another reason why time zones make this better. Particularly with Melbourne/Brazil which seem to get out of Sync with Pacific Time - being able to eyeball Big Page O' international clocks to see what time it is in those regions this week helps me keep our meetings at a sane hour.

[tehwebguy]

That makes a lot of sense, but it seems like there would still need to be some sort of qualitative way to consider the "effective time zone" of someone you're communicating with.

This may not be typical, but when I set up a call with someone on PT (I'm on ET) here's my current thought process: "OK they're on PT so whatever time that works for me is 3 hours earlier for them"

If we switched to UTC I would still have to think something like: "OK they probably start / end the working day 3 hours later than I do"

[citricsquid]

Product idea:

A web service where everyone has a "profile", profiles can be grouped by company, by office, by all sorts of things. Every profile keeps information on the persons location and the relevant timezone. If someone needs to arrange a meeting they select the relevant profiles ("SF office, NY office, contractor #14") and it provides all the relevant timezones, maybe even with the options to "automatically" calculate the best time to arrange a meeting for all the parties involved. Tie-ins with google calendar and the like.

We use Skype and so I rely on Skype to tell me what time it is locally for the employees I'm interested in, it works but it's far from elegant.

Maybe I should build this.

[zanny]

I just communicate with people across time zones in UTC already. And once I do it, a lot of my colleagues start doing it too, because it makes sense.

[benjamincburns]

I think Outlook does this already?

[ajanuary]

I kinda wish if an email has '10am EST' it would have a little hover tooltip to show it in my local timezone. I'm sure once people started noticing it and how useful it is you'd get more people putting timezones in their emails.