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Go has an unusual way of specifying date formats. The "example" timestamp is a format spec and I believe the 'Z' will correctly handle offset signs.

From the docs:

Replacing the sign in the format with a Z triggers the ISO 8601 behavior of printing Z instead of an offset for the UTC zone.

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There are several standards that specify how offsets should appear, but only Go uses Z (meaning Zero offset, aka UTC equivalent) followed by what appears to be a _positive_ number to represent a _negative_ offset...

By this logic we can expect to see a Moscow time stamp represented as HH:MM:SS+03:00 in every other program, and HH:MM:SSZ-03:00 only in Go.

It's just wrong, for no good reason.

You are misunderstanding what you are seeing. The Z does not represent a literal Z in parsing/formatting.

https://play.golang.org/p/Qp-bBtzKpG-

OK, Thanks for clearing that up.

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