There was a discussion not tool long ago about modern banks still with archaic practices. I have accounts at two different banks, and if I make a transfer request before 1:45PT, it is counted as same day. That makes no damn sense to me why that's a limitation at all today. It's not like a human needs to look at it, but even so, why the 1:45PT cutoff? Is it because it is 4:45ET? Then why not list it as that? And why does a banking computer system care about timezones or bankers' hours at all. It's all just mind boggling lame
I know my father sometimes had to take 1 am phone calls because the insurance industry runs a lot of batch processing overnight, when the systems aren't competing with OLTP traffic. Banking software may be built the same way.
It's because when you do transfers, the banks will reconcile their accounts at the end of the day (e.g, if one bank deposits more to another, they will need to make up the difference with their own capital).
These cutoff means banks have certainty about the transaction, as these reconciliation is batched, rather than real time.
If more businesses were based in Indiana we would understand this problem better.
Gary Indiana is a population center on Lake Michigan, across the Illinois/Indiana border from the Chicago exurbs. They’ve elected to be in the same time zone as Illinois, while the rest of the state is in the same time zone as Ohio. And 1997-2006 was just a clusterfuck where another county joined with Gary, and a bunch of counties decided not to follow DST.
I am not smart enough to know what time it is without asking a computer.
A late fee that a customer quietly pays is a win. A late fee that a customer feels you screwed them over on and kicks up a fuss about can be more trouble than it's worth.
Because everyone is too stupid to understand them at 2 am when alarms are going off. All backends should always be in UTC, even if your boss tells you we will “never” move our servers to another time zone. Because they’re going to buy or be bought by a company based in Chicago or New York or find a vertical so fat they want a second office there, or both. And then they will not remember promising you that you would never have to do a time zone migration. Why are you being so grumpy, just fix it?
Rude perhaps, but I think it very much is the actual reason. "If they listed it as 4:45ET their support costs would be higher" is perhaps the more polite way of putting it, but the meaning is not actually any different.
