A tangent, but I hope the world gets its shit together and gets rid of DST.

I am currently enjoying DST-free life in Japan, and feel that people around the world deserve to get this much respect from their own official clocks.

Almost everyone wants to get rid of the twice annual clock changes but are nearly evenly divided on if DST should be permanent or cease to exist. It's a strange artifact of wanting clock noon to be the midpoint of the workday but also wanting to maximize the hours of daylight after work.

Who wants clock noon to be the midpoint of the workday? The canonical working hours are 9am to 5pm [Parton 1980] whose midpoint is at 1pm. Many people work earlier and/or later, but my impression is that it's pretty unusual to have the midpoint at noon.

(Schools tend to have earlier times. It's not so unusual for a school's workday to have its midpoint at about noon, I think.)

9-5 sounds so luxurious in today’s 8-6 world where comms start at 7am and wrap up around 9pm.

I hope you get paid for being on-call those hours.

Clock noon already isn't the midpoint of the working day (9-5) for many people. I don't think anyone cares about it being when the sun is at its highest in the sky either. This isn't even something most people know, and it's not even true unless you live on the Greenwich meridian or n*15 degrees east or west. What matters is how early we have to get up in winter vs early we have to go to bed in the summer.

I've always been in favour of keeping the clocks at non-DST all year, but now I have a new proposal: keep them at DST and just hibernate in the winter. Work an hour or two less in the winter when it's miserable.

>but also wanting to maximize the hours of daylight after work.

Maybe adjust the work schedule to e.g. start at 8 instead of 9?

Rather than mess with the actual clock.

This is a coordination problem. DST was the solution many societies found.

Shouldn't people wanting to maximize the hours of daylight after work work night shifts?

Where do I find a software engineering job that has night shifts?

Remote job for a company in a different time zone

Spoken as if 80% of the software engineer workload isn't attending status update meetings to provide updates on why nothing is getting done

I'm not saying it isn't, but when the 9am scrum meeting is at 4pm your time, you can be quite the night owl!

I would wish for that as well, but it’s unlikely to happen. In the EU for example, some countries would be on the losing side, either by getting “bad” hours or by having to move to a different time zone than their neighbor, which has significant economic consequences. Such countries won’t agree to a DST abolishment that disadvantages them.

And for program code, it wouldn’t really help as long as it’s still expected to be able to correctly handle dates in the past.

I don’t understand how eliminating DST would impact economics of neighboring countries… today they both change clocks, tomorrow they don’t. What changes?

It’s not eliminating DST as such, it’s switching to a different time zone than their neighbor. Eliminating DST means that either the East-most or West-most country would get unfavorable hours, either in summer or winter. They can mitigate that by changing their time zone, but now that means they’ll be in a different time zone than their neighbor, which they previously shared a time zone with. For example Spain could switch to a different time zone than France, to get less extreme hours of days compared to what is currently Central European Time, but having a time difference would have economic costs between Spain and the rest of CET land. (Arguably, both Spain and France should switch to UTC, based on their proximity to the Greenwich meridian, but a time difference between France and Germany would be even worse.)

I’m not sure how real those costs would be beyond a transitional period, but that’s the discussions that have been going on. It’s a political risk, and nobody wants to be on the losing side of such a change.