Summary
Most European countries moved clocks forward one hour on Sunday, marking the start of daylight saving time (DST), a practice increasingly criticized.
Originally introduced during World War I to conserve energy, DST returned during the 1970s oil crisis and now shifts Central European Time to Central European Summer Time.
Despite a 2018 EU consultation where 84% of nearly 4 million respondents supported abolishing DST, implementation stalled due to member state disagreement.
Poland, currently holding the EU presidency, plans informal consultations to revisit the issue amid broader geopolitical priorities.
To people thinking of enforcing UTC around the globe:
obligatory: https://qntm.org/abolish
Before I read this article, I also thought it would be a great idea to get rid of timezones entirely and just use UTC for everything. To quote from the link,
(copied from one of my 9-month old comments)
I mean the best refute of it I’ve ever heard is that the date changes in the middle of the day, and that sounds miserable
UTC all around the world is a completely different thing than UTC (or UTC+1) all over Europe. China also spans just over three natural timezones and they get by just fine with one.
China spans five geographic time zones and it does cause some pain to those living far away from Beijing. It’s not a great system.
Because Beijing should be using Chongqing time, yes, then the offset of clock noon to natural noon would be at most something like ±1.5 hours.
I advocate for UTC everywhere. So far I’m always dismissed as a joke.
Because time doesn’t really matter in any of those situations.
You still need to know all that information.
Yeah, that is silly. If you’re going to be that radical, you may as well go decimal at the same time. 10 hours, 100 minutes, 100 seconds. Ignore when the sun rises. Have 400 days in a year, ignore when the seasons come. I bet you my best docker container people hate and ignore the broken system that bears no relationship to their reality.
Since for most people and most of the world the normal life follows a fairly daylight centred rhythm that is something that’s sensible to use as a common basis.
Yes but
It makes programming hard
Nobody stops programmers from converting everything into UTC when data and queries go in and back to local time when data comes out.
In fact I worked in a number of systems used across quite a number of time zones (mainly EMEA, but sometimes including all of the US) in Finance and that’s exactly how we did it.
Users could work with their local time and meanwhile the system was always internally consistent because at the data level it used a single standard timezone (which has no such thing as daylight savings) for the whole World.
Handling Timezones in systems with a central master datastore for the whole World is a solved problem, it’s just that most programmers don’t actually work in such systems during their careers so aren’t used to it.
It’s like you didn’t think I had real life scenarios that didn’t fit into this fix.
What happens when the interfaced system provides a date without timezone information? What happens when they provide multiple timezones? What happens when they have more than one site location, and they just send you a 12-hour time and date?
You can always point to the customer - say “hey, we need better data.” But what happens when you have 4000 customers scattered all over the world?
Or another scenario - you are doing optical character recognition, and the document always has a date/time on it. The date and time is usually printed, but sometimes it’s handwritten. Maybe part of the process is to verify that date matches with a date in a legacy system. The date in the legacy system is local to your business, but there is no information on what the datetime on the document is.
I’ve run into so many problems with time in my career that I’m fairly certain it’s created more work than any other problem.
When the date timezone is not specified the interface just picks up the local time of the user. Even web stuff will send you this info so even there is perfectly doable.
I’m talking about systems where we design both the interface and the backend.
If the user wants a different behaviour it’s up to them to specify it and the interface is designed so that they can do it it - if they don’t it’s their problem, not the system’s: this is hardly the only situation were the software can’t just guess information that’s not provided (random example, when a full name is provided in a single line: has it been provided family name first and then surname or the other way around - this is also an international problem by the way since in most of Asia the natural order tends to be family name first: the most common solution for this is to just break it into two fields, explicitly one for surname and family name, but that introduces the problem of which middle names are part of the surname and which are part of the family name, for people with more than 2 names).
Generally the approach in systems design for balancing the need for complete and consistent information of a software system operating in a certain environment (such as across timezones and having to compare data between time zones) with users, being human hence naturally only providing part of the information and not context (mentally they just assume those things which for them “are always the same” and generally don’t even think about them, whilst programmer do think about it because computers are stupid) is to provide good defaults and if that context information is important for your system, designing the UI to have a “validate this” step which makes it very obvious the default value that has been filled for that information or some other mechanism (it really depends on the business process that the user is following) and lets the user change it (for when they do in fact want something else), along with the means for the user to pull out that data and correct it later because somebody at some point will invariably make a mistake in entering data and have to fix it.
All this is a foundational element of software design - humans will always go around carrying tons of assumptions in their minds about a ton of things and don’t want to “waste time” always filling in the form the value for those assumptions, so as a system designer you have to find a balance between not wasting the time (and patience) of lots of users because you’re forcing them to have to enter info that’s redundant 99.99% of the time, and data consistency - and you do that by designing appropriate user flows and user interfaces, which include taking in account that people will always make mistakes (so you design your system to reduce the chances of human error AND give them a process for later correcting the info info they entered).
Granted, proper design of multi-tiered systems (which include a UX/UI) to balance user needs and the almost laughably bad level of data “integrity”, completness and consistency in the minds and communication of human users, with system needs, isn’t exactly a common skill amongst software developers: I’ve seen plenty of junior devs and even mid-level devs expressing the very same frustrations as you about lots of things (not just dates and times) and blaming the users - blaming lusers is almost a stereotipical thing for programmers at a certain level of seniority - and then the whole thing boils down to crap systems design (often UI, but often also things like not have the appropriate steps in user flows to make sure unusual cases - such as users entering times in a timezone other than their local one - are spotted and validated/adjusted) and/or their own selfisheness that life should be harder for the many in order for them - the few - having an easier life.
Ultimatelly, the (IMHO) error of your point of view is that you seem to be forgetting that we programmers do our work for our users, not for ourselves - it’s up to us to design our software to be used by humans within the environment they live in, not for everybody else to change their lives to make our job easier. This too is a foundational element of software design.
It’s up to programmers to adapt to the conventions of most people in the World, not the other way around.
By “interface” I meant the data interface between systems. Not a User Interface.
Additionally, it’s been my experience that I rarely get to design the full stack - we inevitably have to handled data exchange and legacy systems. Those legacy systems are a type of “user” in this instance that we have to program for. We can take a 13:30 string, and store it in UTC, but without location or time zone being provided through that (which the message queue that we pull from doesn’t have), it doesn’t do us anything.
The solution for these type of problems usually involve find another source of data and mapping the time that way. This inevitably ends up being far more work for us because of the security, traceability, auditing, etc.
In my own experience, ideally you try to avoid using such interfaces. If however you’re forced to handle such things (which is far too common) the design which is cheapest and safest is to convert to UTC using a suitable default timezone at the interface level and store the result in your core system time field AND also store the local time but not in a field that you actually use for queries and computations in the core. If (more likely, when) some of those times converted with a “suitable” default turn out to have been wrong in some way - which is not necessarilly something due to the timezone conversion - you can manually fix just those (ideally with bulk data update).
Mind you, a lot of this shit needs to be solved at the systems design and requirements specifications level - either it’s accepted that the system will have a fraction of the time data wrong (and it will always do anyway, even without timezones: users enter wrong dates, OCR data reading can’t correct for users filling-in the wrong time in a time field on a document, timestamps generated by machines whose internal clocks are not regularly synched with NTP serves can be off my many minutes and so forth), or the whole thing is designed as I described above so that all data is treated as compatible and when it inneviably turns out some times in some fields were wrong or incorrectly translated, you can fixe it in an non-automated way.
As much as the dream is to have the computer do everything itself in code and the data be perfect, that’s incompatible with the real world, and that’s for way more things than just time values.
The point is, again, that programmers have to deal with the world as is (and dates are hardly the only “quirk” around), not the world as they would like it to be, and that needs to be dealt with already at the level of system design by the (supposedly) senior designers and technical architects rather than having programmers running around fixing the innevitable problems in a system whose design does not take in account the quirks of how certain kinds of data are produced and consumed: proper systems design is about minimising the direct and indirect consequences of data errors, inconsistencies and datatype-specific quirks, not trying to fulfill expectations that all data in one’s system is perfect.
So no night shift bonus until contract is renegotiated…?