> trying to answer "is this a reasonable time to contact someone?" across great distances

This is a problem right now. My brother lives in Japan but I have no idea if 4pm my time is a reasonable time for him or not without going online and looking it up.

Going to UTC would make scheduling meetings really easy because you'd just say "Meeting at 13:00" and for some people that's the afternoon and others it's the morning and some it's the middle of the night, but there's no timezone math to be done.

I'm doing interviews right now and I have always put "I'm available 10am to 4pm (Mountain)" or I get an interview for "3:30pm EST" (which I then have to think about is 1:30pm my time).

If there were no timezones we wouldn't have to do all that.

Wouldn’t you have the same problem of availability though? The issue is not whether the meeting time is the middle of the night - you can do the same thing now by saying the meeting is at 4pm EST and not being concerned about what time it is elsewhere. Making the time UTC everywhere doesn’t resolve that a person in Japan at the same UTC time simply will not attend the meeting because they’re asleep at that time. Switching to UTC everywhere simply changes the question form what time is it there? To are they asleep or awake there? It doesn’t seem like this makes the scheduling aspect easier because regardless of what the clock says you always have to ask the availability question.

This thread is making it very apparent to me that programmers live in a bubble.

Most people on earth don't have to contact someone outside of their timezone even once a week. Some people on earth don't contact anyone outside of their timezone even once a year. Why the heck would anyone suggest make a massively disruptive change to their lives in exchange for making life slightly easier for programmers? That's completely ass backwards. Increasing complexity for programmers in exchange for making user's lives easier is a tradeoff that any good, experienced programmer should always make 100% of the time.

If anything I'd agree with a suggestion made later in the thread : We should move towards infinite time zones, where noon and midnight are always when you expect they are, and smartphones magically tell you exactly where the sun is at the location of the person you are attempting to communicate with.

That other suggestion isn't good either. Let's say there is a train that leaves at a certain time. They will have to provide the exact GPS coordinates for someone to know when they need to be at the train station

That’s not as hard as it sounds. Google maps probably knows the exact location based on the name. Also, the user only needs to know the time at the station and the offset from local time e.g. “train leaves at 3 pm local, the time at the station is about 2 hours ahead of you now”.

The question you ask now is "what time is it in X place?" if you want to know if its reasonable to call someone.

But that is insufficient knowledge. You also need to know their work schedule, when they prefer to sleep, if they are busy that day. You call people regularly who are preoccupied or who just aren't in the mood.

I have two cousins who share a time zone apart from mine, but one works the night shift. So one sleeps 10-18 and works 22-06 their time and the other sleeps 23-07 and works 09-17. If you call one in their in between hours one is just waking up while the other is tired, in the same time zone.

You cannot even just assume "people everywhere wake up at 7 and go to bed at 11 within their timezones" because timezones are not consistent between countries, within countries, or across continents. Different cultures have different daily routines and schedules.

This is why people have just gradually, especially in newer generations, gravitated towards asynchronous communication as a default.

On the flipside, if you wanted to ask the question "we are on the same universal time, is it safe to call X?" you are asking a better question anyway since you need to know the regular available schedules of people where that person lives, just not on your presumed "normal" timetable.

Travel alarm clocks are a great topic, because they already require manual intervention for all the aforementioned time zone inconsistencies. To build a working "automatic" travel clock you need a full computer with GPS to do precise location to map you to the TZ database and then to also look up sunrise and sunset because those aren't consistent even with timezones.

An "everywhere is UTC" clock requires just as much hardware, but only one question - when is sunrise here? Because you just set your wakeup time near that if you are diurnal. Which not even everyone is. Especially in the hacking space where there are plenty of night owls.

Seeing as almost no comms are direct, they are all intermediated by code, let the receiver decide. I for one would decide to never get contacted. :)

Time zones don't fix the issue of knowing a good time for something. You have to look up your different offsets and then math it out, which is exactly what you'd do even if the time zones didn't exist.