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Comment by physhster | Hacker News Reader

Google is PDT-centric, and never grew out of it. Everything is Mountain View time internally and it's so jarring.

It comes across as really uncaring to the probably 99.9999% of people outside of the US who have no idea offhand what UTC offset it is, it almost feels hostile.

If they at least included “(UTC -7)” after PDT, while still a bit annoying, at least people could work out what time that is without having to lookup PDT from somewhere first (as I just had to).

Shrug. They're big enough to set a standard (much as we have GMT because France and the UK had enough political / economic / cultural gravity in the era of the steamboat to make the world care what a "Greenwich" was).

We just keep a clock on the wall set to Google time, like they do in newsrooms and NASA mission control. It's convenient enough.

The annoying thing is that everyone thinks they're big enough to force their own TZ.

Southwest airlines does it.

Rackspace used to do it, to the point of needing to ask them pretty please stop provisioning hardware on central time. Obnoxious.

I'm impressed that Stack Overflow / Stack Exchange (presumably US-based) uses UTC for things like resetting daily vote limits.

And tbh, Florence Mean Time would've made more sense in lining up the world on the map.

On Mercator map projection, sure, but then we'd have to address that tyranny as well.

Settle down CJ Craig.

It shouldn't matter. Florence is antiopodal to somewhere slightly east of the Chatham Islands; on the same longtitude as the Diomede Islands.

The argument for Florence Mean Time is that when you spread the map out, you get a nice split of the Pacific on either side. It's quite beautiful actually.

- Chuktoka isn't split and stays all together on the right side of the map - Zealandia all stays together on the right side, along with Samoa and Tokelau

It's also kinda poetic having the 'centre of time' being basically equidistant from Rome and Carthage.

> It's convenient enough.

It doesn't sound like it.

You get used to it. It's exactly as convenient as having all my logs in GMT and then having to do the math to convert from those numbers to when people on the team were actually awake / asleep / at lunch, especially since my team is smeared across a half-dozen timezones too.

MTV time is fine if it's consistent and says that it's MTV time. From what I remember, a lot of stuff at Google doesn't clarify the time zone, and there's some UTC stuff mixed in.

When I started at a large company in 2020, I began to notice that they advertised all times: meetings, deadlines, events, in terms of "EST". Even when it was Daylight Savings Time.

So, being in Arizona where it's never DST, I called them out on it, and I continually bothered them when they used this "EST" notation. I told them that they were simply wrong to use it during Daylight Savings Time. I told them that MST and Eastern Time did not have a year-round relationship. They didn't care.

It turns out that a lot of very large corporations use "EST" (and other "standard time" notation) all year round. Including FedEx and UPS, for some reason.

It is obviously ridiculous, when you could simply use "ET" instead, and always be right, no matter what your DST status is. But they insisted on using this "EST" thing.

I had a conversation or two with some LLMs about it, and they rationalized it. But it is crazy to subject people to this "corporate fiction" that is obviously wrong/inaccurate for an entire half of the year, and it leads to a lot of problems.

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