I always just basically ignore TZs and always use UTC when communicating with my international team. Only using a single timezone for everything simplifies things a lot.
How do you handle DST? That's the only wrinkle I can see, recurring meetings changing time based on the season. With location-specific meetings, we've been lucky so far and all countries involved switched to DST at around the same time.
That's exactly the issue -- you want your local meeting at a particular local time, and if you schedule it in UTC, the meeting shifts by an hour twice a year.
this isn't a solvable problem with a sufficiently dispersed group. not even all US states observe DST, let alone all the countries in the world. you can't set a recurring meeting that will always be at the same local time for everyone.
Which is fine when you know the other people are in another zone, except they then have to do the conversion in their heads. If you speak like most people do when not thinking about time zones you just say a time. If time is the same for everybody then there is never any confusion. The computers are all doing it in UTC under the covers. The conversion is just because we have arbitrary layers on top of that.
PDT meaning? The reason for using Continent/City is that it's unambiguous and it's easy to find out what the time is in a city -worst case you can ask someone who lives there.
But PDT is unambiguous. It is used for nothing except Pacific Daylight Time. That was standardized a long time before the Olsen database which added Continent/City as a convenience.
Luckily, I'm in the middle of a work-avoidance session, and I found some delicious trivia[0].
'''
Unlike most of the United States, Arizona does not observe daylight saving time (DST), with the exception of the Navajo Nation, which does observe DST. The Hopi Reservation, which is not part of the Navajo Nation but is geographically surrounded by it, also does not observe DST. For this reason, driving the length of Arizona State Route 264 east from Tuba City while DST is in place involves six time zone changes in less than 100 miles (160 km).
'''
