Except when you have to work with people geographically separated. Trying to figure out when their work hours are UTC, and when yours are, so as to line it up. Boom, you’ve reinvented timezones by a different name.
Let’s say the European goes to work at 8 o’clock UTC. The American in this example goes to work 6 hours later at 14 o’clock UTC. Both now exactly when the other one is in office. Time zones aren’t needed here.
Time zones are an invention to keep the zero hour (for hour counting) at about the same local time - midnight. Midnight was easier to determine that UTC (or GMT). A peasant could do it in a day without the help of expensive tools everywhere on Earth. As a matter of fact almost each city in medieval times had its own local time. To get that sorted out they where clustered into time zones.
The other use for timezones besides local midnight is the offset between geographical areas. UTC+2 or UTC+4. if I start work at 6 UTC and my buddy at 10 UTC, I know for scheduling purposes we are 4 hours shifted from each other. Whether you have to do math or not depends, but it is still a “timezone” by a different name. The only way to completely get rid of timezones is to ignore local time altogether.
Except that in practice you’re still adding people’s personal schedules on top of the time zones, so just accounting for their personal schedules in UTC makes things easier.
My company is fully remote. We use the working hours that people set on their calendar, because even people in the same time zone may not have the same working hours. My working hours start 30 minutes later than someone one timezone to my west.
Except when you have to work with people geographically separated. Trying to figure out when their work hours are UTC, and when yours are, so as to line it up. Boom, you’ve reinvented timezones by a different name.
No? UTC by definition doesn’t know time zones.
Let’s say the European goes to work at 8 o’clock UTC. The American in this example goes to work 6 hours later at 14 o’clock UTC. Both now exactly when the other one is in office. Time zones aren’t needed here.
Time zones are an invention to keep the zero hour (for hour counting) at about the same local time - midnight. Midnight was easier to determine that UTC (or GMT). A peasant could do it in a day without the help of expensive tools everywhere on Earth. As a matter of fact almost each city in medieval times had its own local time. To get that sorted out they where clustered into time zones.
The other use for timezones besides local midnight is the offset between geographical areas. UTC+2 or UTC+4. if I start work at 6 UTC and my buddy at 10 UTC, I know for scheduling purposes we are 4 hours shifted from each other. Whether you have to do math or not depends, but it is still a “timezone” by a different name. The only way to completely get rid of timezones is to ignore local time altogether.
Except that in practice you’re still adding people’s personal schedules on top of the time zones, so just accounting for their personal schedules in UTC makes things easier.
My company is fully remote. We use the working hours that people set on their calendar, because even people in the same time zone may not have the same working hours. My working hours start 30 minutes later than someone one timezone to my west.