Hilarious. Didn't they just announce a return to the office? Now they're complaining?

As an investor, if a company doesn't know what to do with their employees - it's a bad signal.

I think with this kind of leadership they should probably liquidate and return money to the stockholders.

Seems rather tenuous to base an application on this API that may randomly decide that you're banned. The "decisions" reached by the LLM that bans people is up to random sampling after all.

I hear a bunch of companies are thinking of moving everything back to the office.

Everything? Employees and the servers?

I guess I'll follow suit and go back to on-premises.

Except they don't need to take it now, just before anyone else does.

Let's say a given intelligence agency's quantum computing efforts have Shor working for 16 bit keys in 2025, for 64 bit keys in 2028, for 128 bit keys in 2033, and for 256 bit keys in 2038. Let's say competing intelligence agencies are 1-3 years behind. Let's say we make it to Puzzle 69 over the next four years. Nice.

I don't know how plausible that timeline is either in spacing or accuracy.

Sometime in early 2029, a bunch of people suddenly find that they're eligible for a $400,000 cash prize if they manage to secretly steal a bit of time on a working quantum computer. In 2030, that group of people doubles, and incorporates a new agency with its own security weaknesses. By 2031 we're talking about four separate countries with their own engineers that have managed to achieve the capability to claim that cash prize. Private corporations are somewhere on the horizon. Very soon this becomes an urgent imperative to anyone inclined, because the prize, like cash, disappears the moment that somebody else seizes it.

It's hard to keep conspiracies, particularly with a verifiable open offer of large amounts of highly portable money on the table to the first person to reveal secrets, and a gradually widening circle of access. The gradually expanding circle of access is what ensures we get some kind of alarm LONG before 2038. Keeping that secret to even 2033 requires hundreds of people and four agencies with diverse motivation and values to consistently turn down cash money for years on end in the interest of keeping their quantum capabilities hidden from the world.

In other words, anyone else with access to the same computing power, and part of the conspiracy

"access"

I was expecting planning for climate change and the rising sea levels.

By the time the Engineer has gone through the effort to find some place to go to, it's well past time for the company to increase pay.

They'd have to pay more than the difference, so they don't. And they'd have to be able to predict which engineers are about to leave (and churn models are terrible.)

I don't know. Every job I've left, I would have stayed if they counter-offered for some X factor of my new offer. Some of those companies were terrible, but that just means the factor would have to be very large. But I have to admit, the worst job I've ever had, I'd gladly go back to for, say $1M/year.