[HN Gopher] Show HN: I made a site to tell the time in corporate
___________________________________________________________________
Show HN: I made a site to tell the time in corporate
Author : steadycourse
Score : 142 points
Date : 2025-02-24 17:33 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (corporate.watch)
(TXT) w3m dump (corporate.watch)
| codingdave wrote:
| Are you aware that not all corporations follow the calendar year?
| steadycourse wrote:
| Of course - no doubt there are many schemes! I have found this
| to be by far the most common
| cj wrote:
| A quick Google shows 65% of public companies use calendar
| year as their FY.
|
| At our startup, it's even more complicated :) we use calendar
| year for official financial / business metrics, while our
| planning quarter is offset by 1 month (Q1 = Feb/Mar/Apr).
| Raed667 wrote:
| Same.. This is my personal hell
| lmkg wrote:
| At least you're using the actual months. I've recently
| had to deal with 4-5-4 Retail Calendars. Explaining to my
| coworkers why the data for September includes dates from
| both August and October, and that's Working As Intended.
| deathanatos wrote:
| I can't remember the last time I worked at a corporation that
| used the actual Gregorian calendar.
|
| Most of the times it's some shadow-Greg calendar that's
| slightly out of phase. E.g., I think my 2025Q1 starts on 1
| Mar? I've never been entirely sure.
|
| Intel used some "work week" concept that I never figured out
| the rules for, in the entire time I worked there, beyond that
| it wasn't ISO weeks.
|
| The spirit of the idea is neat, though, and I should build
| something like this internally but using whatever esocalendar
| we're using... then I'd be able to remember whether we're +1
| mo, +2 mo, 1Y-1mo ... or whatever ... out of phase with
| normal people.
| shagie wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar
|
| > The International Fixed Calendar divides the year into 13
| months of 28 days each. A type of perennial calendar, every
| date is fixed to the same weekday every year. Though it was
| never officially adopted at the country level, the
| entrepreneur George Eastman instituted its use at the
| Eastman Kodak Company in 1928, where it was used until
| 1989.
|
| Might it have been something along that line?
| iancmceachern wrote:
| I've always been curious about folks who use this phrasing and
| tone.
|
| "Are you aware" always seems condescending to me. It's a weird
| assumption to make that because someone made a choice, that
| they weren't aware that there were other choices.
|
| It's like walking up to someone who drives a Honda and saying
| "are you aware you could have bought a Ford?"
|
| Please help me, us there another interpretation of this kind of
| phrasing?
| codingdave wrote:
| You could take it at face value. I have no idea if this was a
| 15 minute off-the-cuff effort, or a larger researched
| project. Rather than assume they either did or did not know,
| I asked. If they knew, they can explain their choice more. If
| they did not, they have something new to look into.
|
| If you are taking it as condescending, that is on you. It was
| simply a question.
| 42lux wrote:
| Even if someone didn't find your initial comment
| condescending, they likely would find this one to be so.
| mmooss wrote:
| > If you are taking it as condescending, that is on you.
|
| Tone is an essential, unavoidable, yet undefineable thing.
| There's a geek fantasy that humans communicate logically
| and explicitly using only literal meanings of words, but
| the reality is that most human communication is in body
| language, tone, emotion, context, and more - and there's no
| way to define exactly how all those work or what they mean.
|
| I got the same impression as the GP. I'm not always great
| at it myself but unless I make sure my tone conveys what I
| want it to convey, I'm rolling the dice.
| jrockway wrote:
| The best way to look at it is that "are you aware" is
| always condescending. There are two answers; yes and no. If
| they say yes, they have to apologize for not adding your
| feature. If they say no, you're calling them ignorant.
| There isn't an out that deescalates and reduces the
| toxicity, so you're forcing everyone to now be as rude as
| you.
|
| Phrasing your statement like "my corporate year starts on
| November 15th; is there any way to offset the start of the
| year?" would sound nicer. If the author was aware of that
| and didn't add the feature, then they can say so. Or if
| they weren't aware, they can say "good idea". Now nobody
| has to get defensive and the heat of the conversation can
| generally decrease, keeping everyone happy and polite.
| sakisv wrote:
| I have no reason to doubt your explanation and intention,
| however I think it would have been more efficient if this
| misunderstanding could be avoided.
|
| Maybe something like "This looks good. Would be nice to see
| it extended to support companies that do not follow the
| calendar year.".
| gosub100 wrote:
| I hate the "not all" argument. It falsely accuses us of
| making a claim that all X has property Y. It falsely implies
| that we cannot comment about a feature unless we expand the
| comment to the universe of other features. The "didn't you
| know" barb ties in here, as it presupposed that we somehow
| agreed to this "must include all" rule and broke it.
| nottorp wrote:
| For advanced features the enterprise edition of this site is
| available. Call our sales team to discuss a solution that will
| meet your needs.
| jrockway wrote:
| I would like to integrate with 30 bespoke SSO providers; is
| that something that I could be charged $100/user/month for
| after spending 8 hours of my time in some Zoom calls with
| people that aren't sure?
| nottorp wrote:
| 100/user/bespoke sso provider/month right?
|
| Plus the support contract and the 200% administrative fee.
| andai wrote:
| s/Are you aware that/Btw,/
| Unearned5161 wrote:
| neat!
| ggambetta wrote:
| Could be useful to have the number of working days left in the
| quarter (even an approximation of 5/7 would do).
| ibizaman wrote:
| 5 out of 7? I must say, this is a grading scale like no other
| I've seen before!
| ninju wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_of_Nine
| miki123211 wrote:
| What I would add to this (perhaps below the fold):
|
| 1. The current time in a few major cities around the world (NYC,
| SFO, London, CET, Mumbai and Beijing come to mind), with an
| indication of where it's working day (which is not 9 to 5
| everywhere). Particular emphasis should be put on timezones that
| just started and ended daylight saving (EU and US aren't
| synchronized on this).
|
| 2. Upcoming holidays in major world countries.
|
| 3. Info about which fiscal year it is and when that's going to
| change.
|
| You could probably get Claude to build you an artifact for this
| in 5 minutes though.
| saaaaaam wrote:
| I think you've missed the point. This isn't actually meant to
| be useful. It's commentary on the inane nature of corporate
| milestones.
| ozim wrote:
| Yeah adding holidays totally missing the point - everyone
| knows there are no holidays until quarterly goals are met.
| plumbees wrote:
| This is fun. Seems like you got several comments here trying to
| "improve" it's "usefulness". I like it as is, a piece of art on
| how corporate speak is unrealistically obtuse.
| jay-barronville wrote:
| > I like it as is, a piece of art on how corporate speak is
| unrealistically obtuse.
|
| Definitely obtuse. Why unrealistic though?
| yapyap wrote:
| Rating this website, it's perfect.
|
| I give it a perfect 5/7
| corytheboyd wrote:
| Which is exactly the number of days a week you plebs will work,
| and that is final.
| collingreen wrote:
| Only if the project is ahead of the "copy of pm-
| projQ1-gantchart.v2.final.xls", otherwise gear up for crunch
| time!
| anticorporate wrote:
| That's too high.
|
| We all known perfection only merits a "meets expectations"
| review.
| schainks wrote:
| Feature request: Please add an endpoint that is by stock ticker
| (e.g. "https://corporate.watch/AAPL", as some companies do their
| financial reporting on a different calendar, and it would be nice
| to reference with respect to their "datetime zone".
| TheSmoke wrote:
| every week I search at least once "which week is it" -- kudos :)
| hashmush wrote:
| Uhm? The site doesn't show what week it is..? It's currently
| week 9 of 2025, but the site shows W7 of Q1. (Maybe that's what
| you meant? Searching for the current week in the quarter?)
| TheSmoke wrote:
| oh, I was being subtle since everyone was asking for a
| feature request.
| saaaaaam wrote:
| Love this.
|
| It could look more awful-corporate though.
| corytheboyd wrote:
| I lose a little more will to live each time someone smugly
| reminds us that the fiscal year actually started in February or
| whatever the fuck. God dammit can we just have one CALENDAR. It's
| okay I know you need to close the finances or whatever, but why
| can't that just end in January and start again in February,
| instead of creating this dumb second year for ourselves.
|
| You know what it is? A leaky abstraction. Implementation details
| of finance leaking into something as fundamentally basic as the
| calendar for the entire rest of the company. NO!!!
| staindk wrote:
| Not really relevant but somehow this reminded me of
| https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Valve_Time
| shagie wrote:
| > ... each quarter is ~13 weeks ...
|
| When I worked at Network Appliance (Q1 earnings call is August
| 27th), they used a strict 4-4-5 calendar.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4-4-5_calendar
|
| This meant that it wasn't "about" 13 weeks for each quarter, the
| quarter was defined _as_ 13 weeks (91 days).
| madcaptenor wrote:
| They would have had to add a leap week every five or six years
| to keep that in sync with the normal calendar - did they do
| that, or did they just let the calendar drift?
| shagie wrote:
| It's been... almost 20 years since I looked at that.
|
| I believe that it had a slightly floating start date.
| NetApp fiscal quarters are: Quarter Three: October
| 28, 2024 through January 24, 2025 Quarter Four:
| January 28, 2025 through April 25, 2025 Quarter One:
| April 28, 2025 through July 25, 2025 Quarter Two:
| July 27, 2024 through October 23, 2025
|
| And from Wayback (adjusted to fit same ordering)
| Quarter Three: October 29, 2018 through January 27, 2019
| Quarter Four: January 28, 2019 through April 26, 2019
| Quarter One: April 30, 2018 through July 27, 2018
| Quarter Two: July 30, 2018 through October 26, 2018
|
| 2018-19: https://web.archive.org/web/20180626150216/https://i
| nvestors...
|
| 2019-20: https://web.archive.org/web/20200430103748/http://in
| vestors....
|
| 2021-22: https://web.archive.org/web/20210802092405/https://i
| nvestors...
|
| 2022-23: https://web.archive.org/web/20221001020458/https://i
| nvestors...
|
| 2023-24: https://web.archive.org/web/20230607023812/https://i
| nvestors...
|
| It appears that it floats a little bit.
|
| I remember the 4-4-5 from back then (started in '98, was laid
| off in '09) because we had the old style BIG releases where
| it was a weekend of things changing (and that was ok). The
| last weekend of the first month was infrastructure major
| changes, the last weekend of the second month was software
| major changes, and the last two weeks of the third month were
| hard frozen for accounting to _not_ have changes.
| madcaptenor wrote:
| It looks like they had a 14-week quarter from April 27,
| 2020 to July 31, 2020. Given that there's only one 14-week
| quarter in the data set (which is about what you'd expect)
| I can't figure out what the rule is, but oh well.
|
| Apparently financial analysts are (or were) surprised when
| that extra week leads to corresponding changes for other
| metrics: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/
| pii/S01654...
| mattas wrote:
| I really like this. As easy as it is to be cynical about
| corporate-speak, I find that it's sometimes actually useful
| (except for the whole touching base and circling back jargon).
|
| Questions. When do weeks start? On Saturdays or Sundays? How do
| you account for partial weeks at the beginning/end of years?
| efdee wrote:
| I would understand someone asking if the week starts on Sunday
| or Monday, but I honest to God did not know some people start
| their week on Saturday.
| 9dev wrote:
| Just an off by one error on OPs part, I guess
| fweimer wrote:
| ISO 8601 covers that. Weeks start on Mondays. The first week of
| the year has January 4th in it, which means that it sometimes
| starts on a Monday in the previous Gregorian year. This is why
| strftime has separate format specifiers for ISO year and ISO
| week year, %Y and %G: https://www.man7.org/linux/man-
| pages/man3/strftime.3.html#NO...
| thih9 wrote:
| The ui is not lotus notes[1] enough. Still great.
|
| [1]: or jira, sharepoint, salesforce, google docs, etc
| numbers wrote:
| to really amp it to corpo-speak, you should use the Severance
| styling, they've done a great job really taking out the
| personality from any of their design. feels very dystopian + peak
| corporate!
| ecolonsmak wrote:
| Should add how many working hours are left in the given quarter.
| collingreen wrote:
| Translated to story points
| OptionOfT wrote:
| Paired with a burn rate, assuming people work 20 hours per
| day, don't take PTO and don't get sick.
|
| Management approved of the solution, and based on our data
| your can have it done by ... next week. Can you show the MVP?
| throwaway02341 wrote:
| Does it include unpaid hours checking mail and slack at home?
| MortyWaves wrote:
| Unsure if this is either meant to be funny and cringe or a cry
| for help. I can see it being either.
|
| There is something awful about corpogarbage speak.
| pbronez wrote:
| Its content marking for a metrics tracker / project management
| tool
| https://objectivetrackr.com/?utm_source=corporatewatch&utm_m...
| BaudouinVH wrote:
| It sounds like a marketing guerilla tactic rather than a
| funny web site.
| lokimedes wrote:
| Our corpo year starts May 1.
|
| Please add an offset functionality to your free solution
| immediately, as it has now become a core component of our
| operation, or we will be forced to take legal action.
|
| Also, we appreciate if you could sign a retroactive NDA with our
| legal team ASAP.
| lokimedes wrote:
| My boss tells me we need it in Comic Sans for the next meeting
| with our board of directors.
|
| Thank you.
| collingreen wrote:
| Hello!? No response yet is this project dead or something it
| has been 30 minutes since the last question. This is very
| important to a major customer project of ours please get on
| this.
| bastijn wrote:
| It has come to our attention that an unlicensed tool has
| been used in the workplace. Please be advised that the use
| of unlicensed software is strictly prohibited, as it may
| pose significant legal, security, and compliance risks to
| the company.
|
| Effective immediately, any further use of this tool must
| cease. Failure to comply may result in disciplinary action,
| up to and including termination, in accordance with company
| policy.
|
| If you have any questions or require guidance on approved
| software tools, please contact IT or Compliance.
| LASR wrote:
| When will this tool have SOC compliance and SSO support?
|
| The devs on this must be sleeping. F for not paying
| attention to your users' needs.
| xd1936 wrote:
| Now there's a design that pops!
| rpep wrote:
| lol, yep, mine is 1st October?!
| _n_b_ wrote:
| Offset financial years mean your finance people aren't
| working furiously between Christmas and New Years getting the
| EoY stuff done. I feel bad for the ones in my company every
| year.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Nothing more corporate / enterprise than deciding the year
| starts at any point other than January 1st :) (yeah I know all
| about the fiscal year, which I also find hilarious)
| marcus0x62 wrote:
| Some of them don't even start on a month boundary, or even on
| the same day every year. Cisco, for instance, has a fiscal
| year based on a retail calendar[0]; their fiscal year ends on
| the last full week in July.
|
| 0 - https://nrf.com/resources/4-5-4-calendar
| icameron wrote:
| You know what is really wild and caused a few bugs in corporate
| reporting apps? Every 5 or 6 years you need to account for a 14
| week quarter. 13 * 7 is 364 so four 13 week quarters will not add
| up to a calendar year.
| airstrike wrote:
| Why stop at different fiscal years? We need companies with
| different fiscal calendars entirely.
|
| Lots of great announcements planned for our Q2 FY 44009 earnings
| call!
| throwaway02341 wrote:
| It's missing H1 / H2 :-)
|
| I actually encountered T1 in a company presentation once. I
| thought they were joking, but it's apparently a thing also. I
| guess it hits the sweet spot between a half year and a quarter...
| claytoncorreia wrote:
| You could add how many "selling days" are left in the quarter
| (mon-fri minus holidays).
| mongol wrote:
| I prefer the Swedish site vecka.nu (meaning week.now)
| andai wrote:
| Thanks. This is way better than my current solution, searching
| "[current_year] week calendar" on Google Images.
| WesSouza wrote:
| But what about the fiscal year?!
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Please add how many lunches are left.
|
| And how much time spent figuring out where to go to lunch.
| prerok wrote:
| Time is an illusion. Lunch time doubly so.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| How am I supposed to integrate this into our company infra? No
| observability hooks, no load balancing support, no enterprise
| auth, no RBAC. Lame!
| asalahli wrote:
| All that's missing is a "Happy [day-of-the-week]!" greeting
| aussiedude wrote:
| Where are the AI features?
| yitchelle wrote:
| Based on previous discussions during a review with higher ups,
| there need to be some options as to how the week numbers are
| counted. Can you action that by KW10.3 and report back. I will
| create a JIRA ticket for tracking. Many thanks for your support.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-02-24 23:00 UTC)