The Goldman Sachs executive who didn't so much burn as firebomb his career bridges with a poisonous resignation letter in the New York Times wasn't the only former employee to go on a publicized rant this week. A couple of days earlier, James Whittaker, an engineering director at Google who recently moved to Microsoft, took direct aim at the Mountain View search giant in a blog post arguing that the company has lost its way in the desperate quest to funnel users into its social network. Later that day, in an opinion piece on Wired.com, Andy Baio assailed Yahoo's patent-infringement suit against Facebook ... calling it extortion" and a betrayal of employees. Obviously these parting shots carried extra weight coming from onetime senior, internal sources. While it's hard to draw broad conclusions about the criticisms, we can safely draw some narrow ones: Goldman Sachs should stop being an awful, awful corporate citizen (but then we've known that). Google shouldn't undermine its culture and core product in search of the next big thing. And Yahoo should drop this embarrassing lawsuit over bogus patents and get to work on real innovation. Alas, the conclusion most companies will probably draw from these episodes is that they need to toughen up their nondisclosure agreements.