A software engineer at a mid-size startup announced Tuesday that their new sorting algorithm runs in constant time, a claim that has drawn both excitement and quiet spreadsheet recalculations from the computer science community.

"It's technically O(1)," said the developer, who asked to be identified only as "a 10x engineer." "I just moved the loop into a helper function and agreed not to look at it."

According to internal documentation reviewed by The Constant Times, the function performs several preliminary steps, including input normalization, output stabilization, memory reconciliation, existential reflection, and a brief warm-up phase lasting approximately three hours.

When pressed for the actual value of the constant, the developer remained composed. "The beauty of O(1) is that the constant is constant," they explained. "And what is a constant, really, if not a number we decline to specify?"

Colleagues report that the algorithm does appear to terminate, though not before what one engineer described as "a meaningful amount of time." A benchmark on a standard laptop showed the function returning in approximately four hours, which the developer characterized as "essentially instantaneous if you zoom out."

The startup's CTO expressed full confidence during an all-hands meeting. "We've been trying to eliminate our O(n²) bottlenecks for years," she said. "And technically, this eliminates the n."

Independent reviewers were less certain. One professor of theoretical computer science noted that while the implementation may satisfy a generous interpretation of asymptotic notation, it also appears to allocate memory proportional to the square footage of the office.

Undeterred, the developer unveiled plans to further optimize the system by introducing what they described as "preemptive computation," in which results are generated before inputs arrive. "If we assume the user will sort the same array they sorted yesterday," they said, "we can achieve negative latency."

At press time, the team had begun work on a white paper tentatively titled Rethinking Time, which sources confirm will include several graphs and a strong sense of confidence.