Surveillance critic Bruce Schneier to leave post at BT

Though some of the bias might be naturally eliminated as the quality of journalists is improved.

Journalists tend to have their own cultural biases--although more on political topics than technical ones. But, even if I won't write things I don't believe, I still choose the topics I discuss in public.

A good chunk of news requires personal presence and connection. For example, if you're covering a state legislature or a city government, you just have to spend a lot of time getting to know legislative staff and other people around the capitol or city hall. And you have to have enough readership for them to be willing to talk to you. You might be able to do that in your spare time for a small town, but I don't think it's possible for anything more substantial.

The same is true of investigative journalism. Deep stories take months of research and writing. They take real budgets, real skills, real editorial backing.

I write a lot for fun, and have for years. But there's only so far that fun can take you, and those places don't include the most important societal functions of journalism.

I really love the idea of this, but I think its infeasible given time constraints in every industry, including press. I do think there is room and cross-disciplinary talent in media organizations for a journalist reporting on a (for example) programming heavy topic to grab someone from their engineering staff to collaborate and then share a by-line. If you have someone with domain knowledge in-house you might actually save research time and get a better article even with more people working on it.

And soory if that sounded harsh but you can manipulate any PRP system to get that result - it was an openly admitted fact that every year the scores where manipulated to put the right number of people in the CAT 4 (in need of improvement) who where targeted for redundancy.

Even getting a CAT 2 or 1 wouldn't keep pace with inflation

It is true that firing employees does expose an employer to litigation / tribunal, which can be expensive. However, an employer that is doing stack ranking and is prepared for that sort of thing would not fall victim to the usual things that get companies in trouble - not having good enough performance metrics to justify firing the only X in that department, or assigning unpleasant work to employees to drive them out (which can be seen as constructive dismissal).

I have also noticed some large companies hiring the bulk of their staff as contractors, and 'firing' them for 3 days a year so that they don't become employees. This would make them basically at will employees, but I am not sure how well this would stand up if tested.

This book is cool: http://www.cm-murray.com/little-books/little-book-of-uk-empl...

You couldn't just point blank fire the bottom x% each year based on their ranking, you'd need to give the bottom x% warnings and put them on an improvement plan (so they have a chance to improve) and then, for those that don't, you can sack them.

Even then it may be tricky if you are cutting too deeply. Taking it to the extreme you couldn't use this method to fire the bottom 99% of employees as a tribunal would take that as constructive dismissal.

Firing the bottom 5%, after appropriate warnings/etc, is in the realms of possibility as there's a good chance that the employer can provide documentary proof that the employees fired were performing below expectations should a disgruntled employee take them to tribunal (which, sadly, now costs the dismissed employee £250 to file the claim and £950 if it goes to a hearing.)

And even if I did, that still doesn't involve BT.

I don't have a BT phone cable at my house though, so would need to pay for that to be installed if I wanted to go down that route.