I've seen people saying that about Meta/Facebook for a decade, but I still don't see any tangible damage to former employee's ability to get jobs. The OpenAI situation seems much closer to FB-scale politics than X though.
I think Amazon is a better example. It's a thing that some companies prefer not to hire engineers from Amazon because of the culture they bring. Whether you agree with it or not, Amazon has a reputation for a toxic culture and that sort of thing can ruin a smaller or medium size company if it seeps in.
I mostly agree with you re: Meta/Facebook except that things are becoming a lot more politically volatile than they have been in the past. Generally, I think that most people believe that the more intelligent you are, the more empathetic you are, so at some point if your evil company is doing big destructive evils, the smartest engineers will probably bail.
Depending on jurisdiction, it’s maybe not that smart to hop on the internet and write “if I see it on a resume beyond a certain date, I'm not considering them” and “things are becoming a lot more politically volatile” either.
"Generally, I think that most people believe that the more intelligent you are, the more empathetic you are..."
Okay, you might need to re-evaluate the life lessons you seem to have selectively taught yourself. This is base line culture war 'You must be mentally deficient if you don't align with what I deem to be empathetic right now or I don't think you're nice enough' type stuff.
