The Eighty-Twenty Solution

Looks like it's official now, the Scheme Cookbook is online. The official announcement is

The Schematics Scheme Cookbook is a collaborative effort to produce practical documentation for using the Scheme language, particularly in commercial environments. It is focused on PLT Scheme, although other Scheme dialects are supported as far as possible.

The cookbook is a Wiki that's intended to produce something like the ASPN Cookbooks. It's easy to sign up, so if you know something about Scheme that you'd like to share, jump on in!

via Lemonodor, then about half the Internet, Joyce Park was fired from Friendster. There's been a whole lot of people saying that we have heard only one side to the story, and that's all we'll hear, because of the risk of a lawsuit. I say Bull. A company will comment on a termination if the risk to their business outweighs a lawsuit, and this may be one of those cases. I really have a hard time seeing how someone could make a wrongful termination lawsuit out of a statement that someone was fired for publicly discussing confidential information, for example. Well, yeah, this is the USA, and you can sue anybody for anything, but I do have some experience with this. Any good plaintiff's lawyer will let you know that it's expensive to sue someone and you'd better have a really good case, or risk spending thousands on a trial. Now, state law weighs in heavily here, and CA law may be more employee favoring than CO law, but I still think that in this case, Friendster's lawyers and PR people need to earn their keep.

What interests me personally about this regards the "exposing company secrets" angle. Joyce was supposedly fired for revealing that Friendster switched from Java/J2EE to PHP. Would it be any different if she had posted resumes on monster.com or LinkedIn, or even on her own site, saying that she worked for Friendster and had worked on switching from a J2EE to a PHP architecture? This likely wouldn't have been noticed by slashdot, but it amounts to the same thing. This is absolutely pertinent information to put on a resume, but if this type of thing fails the non-disclosure test, how can you write a useful resume? When I worked at a defense contractor, they had clear policies on what you could say on a resume about the classified project we were working on. Has it come to that for the rest of us? More and more, corporations are taking the stance that not only are the executives and PR people the only source of information about the company, those people are the only legal source.