Comment by physhster
1 day ago
Google is PDT-centric, and never grew out of it. Everything is Mountain View time internally and it's so jarring.
1 day ago
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.
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.
> It's convenient enough.
It doesn't sound like it.
1 reply →
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.
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And tbh, Florence Mean Time would've made more sense in lining up the world on the map.
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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.