this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2024
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They're a downside from a coordination standpoint. If everyone was on UTC, you could say "the meeting is at 04:00" and everyone, anywhere in the world, will know when the meeting is. In the real world, you have to say "the meeting is at 2pm AEST" and then someone in AEDT will have to think "oh, that's 3pm for me", and someone in American EST will have to convert to UTC and then convert to their time. It's a huge pain.
That's not something that DST does. It would be something that switching to year-round DST would do, but permanent standard time doesn't change winter hours at all. It can mean you might have dark mornings (especially early and late summer—after the switch to DST and before the switch back to standard time), depending on how far west you are in your time zone and how far away from the equator you are. That's the main thing DST does: swap bright mornings for bright afternoons in summer. Which is kinda silly considering it's done at the time of year when afternoons are already bright for the longest. It's also very harmful to public health.
But... We have UTC already, so calculating the difference is a non-issue. If you got rid of timezones, you'd still end up creating it in all but name since the vast majority of business will be occurring during daytime hours around the world. For example, an office in Tokyo sending emails to their NYC office at 0800 UTC (currently 0400 EDT in NYC) wouldn't end up getting answered for at least 3-4 hours when those employees started logging in. In other words, people would still be doing calculations in their heads to know when business hours are in that region, essentially recreating timezones.
As for your second paragraph, I agree, and I did have it backwards, thanks for the correction. In the summertime where I live, the sun has risen by roughly 0530 and sets around 2100. In the wintertime, the sun is rising around 0700-0730 and setting around 1630-1700 at its shortest daylight hours. Like you said, staying at standard would mean in the summertime we'd have brighter mornings, but curtains and shutters exist for a reason. Personally, I think having it still be bright out at 2030 is kind of annoying.
For some offices, tech like Teams/Outlook would certainly help, sure. But the majority of offices aren't using that. But even still, people would do it regardless. Say you're going on vacation and want to know when daylight hours are, you'd still be doing the same thing. Timezones may be annoying, but they ultimately make sense. We have a universal time for the planet powering the system, there's really no reason to change it, in my opinion.
Eliminating time zones doesn't make scheduling meetings easier it just changes the language. Instead of figuring out what time it is elsewhere you have to remember what normal working hours are, Europe, US, and Japan aren't all going to be available 9-5 UTC. It's just as easy to suggest a meeting at functionally midnight without time zones.
I'd argue not every job will always be 9-5, so you still get people having to explain working hours with non-UTC timezones anyway, whereas all timezone conversions are eliminated if everyone uses UTC.
Yeah you're absolutely right that it does create a tradeoff. My experience has just been that I'd usually consider it a worthwhile tradeoff. In general, the number of people who have to deal with setting meetings is lower than the number of people who attend meetings, especially when you take into account multinational companies.
And when you're attending a meeting, you only care about knowing what time it has been scheduled for already. It's in scheduling that you have to work out when is going to be best for your audience, and I'm of the opinion that the distinction between "what time is this in my time zone and their time zone?" and "where does this time sit in relation to their working day?" is net neutral. With one aspect being a strict positive and the other being a net neutral (in my opinion), I think it still wins out and becomes worthwhile.