sql time stamps do not respect time zones

we have time stamp data. The time stamp data is UTC how ever when we load the data into spark data frames, the system assume the time stamps are in the local time zone. This causes problems for our data scientists. Often they pull data from our data center into their local macs. The data centers run UTC. There computers are typically in PST or EST.

It is possible to hack around this problem

This cause a lot of errors in their analysis

A complete description of this issue can be found in the following mail msg

https://www.mail-archive.com/user@spark.apache.org/msg48121.html