I work with a group of the most talented people in the world at what they do and 0 of them would want to work in an environment you describe. In fact they won’t even consider a company remotely like what you describe.
Did you read what he wrote?
Their HR is combing through private social media profiles and rejecting everyone who shows any signs of dissent towards anything. What kind of employees do you think are being filtered out in that process? Exactly. The best and brightest.
There is a certain type of person who thinks because they are smart and good at one thing, e.g. software development, their powers of reason allow them to come to the right conclusions about everything. They are super vocal about this on social media, e.g. typical Twitter mob warriors. Because they think they are intelligent and their views are logical to them, everyone intelligent will agree with them ("the best and brightest will want to work with people like me").
Conversely, people disagreeing must either be dumb or have outright malicious intent (e.g. James Damore). This type of person has difficulty accepting that there can be highly intelligent people who come to entirely different conclusions about various issues. They can be intelligent, but they are also often toxic because they are loud and vocal and lead other people to just withdraw from the work environment, lest to provoke them. I am reading the original comment as the HR trying to avoid hiring such people, not that they don't hire someone who expresses dislike about Burger King's offerings or the latest Marvel movie.
That sounds completely reasonable to me. In particular, this says nothing about the morals of the people you do end up hiring. I am not aware of any research investigating the correlation between doing good and virtue signalling on Twitter, but my guess is that you can do one without the other, and that in fact participating in vocal outrage is a distraction to serving your community in more productive ways (e.g. getting people to vote, or otherwise getting anything done to change what you believe must be changed).
Talented people with social activism fantasies are overrated. They can’t always be trusted to simply do what you tell them. They think their talents give them leverage, and that if they see anything they deem improper, they have a responsibility to resist it.
I don’t want to work with mediocre people who end up stuck in jobs they hate.
Real talent does give people leverage.
What you’re describing is not talent - it’s dubious/ exploitative/desperate management practices combined with a funnel of people who don’t know better.
Literally no genuinely talented engineer would stay in a job like the one you describe - it just wouldn’t make sense. Skills especially are very fungible. I can apply to work at Google tomorrow without knowing their tech stack at all, get an offer, and pull down $500k+ a year.
Does your company’s ARR even touch $50m?
But also your firm engages in practices that could be viewed as morally dubious that HR activily screens out people that might have any kind of social media presence. Which sounds like a fear of whistleblowers more than anything.
"They can’t always be trusted to simply do what you tell them."
Such a telling phrase.