Comment by phil21

Well you shifted the goal posts. Storing everything in EST vs UTC isn’t great, but isn’t some business ending level problem. It annoys engineers and causes inefficiency. Unlikely to even show up on a quarterly report if someone chose to write a mandate to fix it.

Once you get to the point of bolting on random systems that need to talk in whatever time zones is when you bite the bullet and change it. Yes, that is expensive.

The point I’m making is that if you spend a week dicking around with two junior devs while in your startup phase arguing about EST vs UTC you lose by default. Would much rather have my imaginary employee just choose EST in 14 seconds and move on at that stage. And I have dealt with systems that have done exactly this.

When it becomes a problem I can afford to fix it. Talking about it for more than 5 minutes at the bootstrap company stage is the definition of bike shedding to me. If those are discussions you are having in your weekly dev meetings you have already lost.

This will obviously depend on exactly what you are developing. Payment systems? Probably way more important to get this right vs. some social media app.

The ironic part to me is that this comment thread is basically bike shedding itself! Timestamps are an age old nerd snipe.