Show HN: I made a site to tell the time in corporate
175 comments
·February 24, 2025cperciva
steadycourse
hey, author here - I want to get on record that I don't think this is silly at all. I think there is something truthful and useful in dividing and conquering time, it's just that generally the bar is so low right now and we should do better!
schainks
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".
TomK32
With the company headquarters as a background image, AI generated with more or less inferno/rainbows depending on last quarter's performance.
schainks
Yes, please!
HenryBemis
Yeah some publicly traded companies have a different 'beginning of the year' but good luck with finding and making one for each (even with some elaborate on-the-fly scripting).
I think the whole effort was to make a funny landing page that would prompt visitors to check the bread-maker objectivetrackr.
soerxpso
It's reasonably easy to get that information from their SEC filings (for public companies), which are all in similar formats, if not exactly the same format. It wouldn't be as hard as you're implying.
HenryBemis
I do not imply that technical implementation is hard, they probably solved the problem even without AI, just have every step of the process (i.e. for every item going to employee 10 have red-amber-green buttons and red pushed back, yellow keeps but with deviations, green is perfect. And a flow would have all metrics. Some random QC/QA would verify and iron out issues.
It is the "camera in my face 8h" that would get A LOT of attention by member state gov/labour ministry and definitely the EDPS would have a party on their corpses.
schainks
Indeed, they even file with the SEC to say WHEN their system starts/ends every year. Investor relations website probably spells this out quite clearly, too.
shawabawa3
But how long do I have before I need to hand in my deliverables at EOD???
This is going to push things back to NBD
encom
>r
Are we really still doing the "-r" branding (brandr)? It is so tiresome.
lokimedes
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
My boss tells me we need it in Comic Sans for the next meeting with our board of directors.
Thank you.
collingreen
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
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.
malfist
Let's get everybody working on the feature into an hour long status meeting to check for blockers.
This is really important so we'll need to do this at least twice a day
_carbyau_
Real World aside: The other day I tried to 3D print small text. (Not super small, just the usual 0.4 nozzle size.) Comic Sans worked out best for this due to pretty constant line width.
soneil
Fonts with 'routed' in their names are often a good place to look for this - they're named thus because they were designed to be scribed/engraved with a router, so very frequently have a constant width.
(and if you're up for a rabbit hole, https://aresluna.org/the-hardest-working-font-in-manhattan/ )
Symbiote
Comfortaa works well for this:
Izkata
I would like to share the existence of Comic Papyrus: https://befonts.com/comic-papyrus-font-finally.html
Imustaskforhelp
It actually looks really good , but I don't see a option to try text like in google fonts for example. Let me see if its on google fonts
Edit:nvm the option to write text is below , I didn't see it. Its kinda cool actually.
xd1936
Now there's a design that pops!
loloquwowndueo
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
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.
conductr
It is for year over year comparability for anyone unfamiliar
saaaaaam
not to be THAT NERD but in the UK at least, the financial year (April 6th - April 5th) was aligned with the start of the new year which was March 25th.
The old financial year started on 25th March, which was also new year's day (and also the point that the year incremented, so if you were knocking around on March 24th 1300 the next day would be March 25th 1301.
But when everyone changed to the Gregorian Calendar - which added 11 days to the calendar to make up for some sloppy Papal mathematicians who didn't believe in things like astronomy or leap years - the tax year had to be shifted to be April 6th, because while everyone else was happy to work around things, the tax office was NOT going to have a tax year that was 11 days shorter because that would have meant less money.
So basically, when the calendar changed happened, new year was set as 1st January (yawn, stupid time to have new year!) at which point the year count incremented up by one year, and the tax year stayed (and still stays) as April 6th, which was really March 25th but with some days tacked on.
1752 must have been a pretty confusing year.
steadycourse
I'll be honest I wasn't expecting just how many people have slightly different start / end dates!
SAI_Peregrinus
ISO 8601 allowing week-based year numbering is even more insane. E.g. In 2007-12-31 (in RFC 3339 format) is allowed to be notated as 2008-W01-1 in ISO 8601. RFC 3339 is superior, partly because it prevents this bullshit.
ISO week numbering is actually sort of neat, because instead of leap days it has entire leap weeks since the 400-year Gregorian cycle has a whole number of weeks in it, but for some reason they decided that a week's year is the Gregorian year in which the Thursday of that week occurs.
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siva7
Reading the comments here gives me PTSD and a wish to go deep down the forest chopping woods
steine65
We should table this discussion and circle back EOD. Regards,
nzealand
We have a P0 to add calendar 445/ 544/ 454. This critical oversight is causing us to lose sales, as our sales folks never know when those companies fiscal year ends, and end up missing budgetary deadlines.
Also, my legal team says your color choices aren't compliant with Section 508, so regrettably, we do have to take legal action.
Edit: EMEA has questions I couldn't answer about GDPR, PII & data governance. Can you please hope on a quick call to see if they also want to sue you?
megadata
> we appreciate if you could sign
No need to appreciate. Signing the retroactive NDA is a non negotiable.
steadycourse
this thread both made me laugh and gave me heart palpitations, thanks everyone!
rpep
lol, yep, mine is 1st October?!
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plumbees
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.
drewcoo
The "improve its usefulness" comments are totally inline with suits (execs) interacting with smellies (software) and make this even better.
jay-barronville
> I like it as is, a piece of art on how corporate speak is unrealistically obtuse.
Definitely obtuse. Why unrealistic though?
steadycourse
Thanks! It's only after this comment that I realised just how close corporate planning is to a parody of itself :)
shagie
> ... 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
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
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
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
2019-20: https://web.archive.org/web/20200430103748/http://investors....
2021-22: https://web.archive.org/web/20210802092405/https://investors...
2022-23: https://web.archive.org/web/20221001020458/https://investors...
2023-24: https://web.archive.org/web/20230607023812/https://investors...
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
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...
steadycourse
All I see is quarter != quarter. How has it come to this!?
icameron
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.
froindt
6-week December threw off a bunch of reporting last year for my company. The reporting group was not aware of the 6-week fiscal month, and the date dimension table didn't reflect it.
Thankfully no particular harm was caused by it.
sureIy
If it were in Europe you could have just taken a couple of weeks off work.
yitchelle
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.
megadata
Sorry, Jira is a bit slow today.
Terretta
Now add business day (BD #) for financial services… in the visitor's country.
Sounds easy, right? Just something like:
https://aakashkh.github.io/python/2019/05/30/Business-Days-C...
But then a wild Holiday appears:
https://fastercapital.com/content/Business-Day--Business-Day...
warkdarrior
How am I supposed to integrate this into our company infra? No observability hooks, no load balancing support, no enterprise auth, no RBAC. Lame!
mattas
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?
fweimer
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...
anitil
My company (left unnamed to protect the guilty) starts our week on Thursday. Or sometimes Wednesday. But definitely not on Tuesday! Except a couple of places where it's Tuesday.
It's juuuust close enough to ISO8601 where with a bit of forethought everything could have been easy.
efdee
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.
froindt
I've seen Saturday for payroll week start. It naturally makes sense to align other business calendars accordingly.
It does get funky with overtime. If weather cancels a Monday-Friday shift, you might schedule a makeup shift on Saturday. What would typically be straight time in the same pay period is now going to cause overtime in the following week.
Symbiote
Muslims, and therefore many countries in the Middle East and North Africa.
silvestrov
What type of week numbers is this? US?
There are multiple different numbering systems for week numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Week#Numbering
MortyWaves
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
Its content marking for a metrics tracker / project management tool https://objectivetrackr.com/?utm_source=corporatewatch&utm_m...
BaudouinVH
It sounds like a marketing guerilla tactic rather than a funny web site.
Ok, I know this is a joke, but... in all seriousness, I recently moved FreeBSD releases to a quarterly calendar. The first month of the quarter, people are encouraged to finish up their works in progress and get them into the tree; the second month, we have BETA/RC builds every week; and in the third month (usually at the start but not always) I do the final RELEASE build.
This wasn't for any corporatey reason though; it just happened that "every 3 months" is a natural cadence for doing releases. (In a sense it's a 6-month cadence, like e.g. Ubuntu, but we support two major versions at any given time, and their schedules interleave.)
Sometimes a calendar quarter is just a calendar quarter.