It's not career suicide. People should talk about shitty places to work more often, and there's no way Zynga can keep another company from hiring the guy. The only time you see "you'll never work in this town again!" work is when all the companies are colluding to control the labor market. In programming that hasn't happened yet, so he can say pretty much whatever he wants and still get a job.
In fact, it was easier for me to get a job after I demolished Ruby on Rails for being the piece of shit that it is. People like honesty.
In a perfect world, people would be able to expose employers who are doing wrong with impunity. In the real world, it's difficult to do so without repercussions. How do you think companies like Zynga can still recruit developers?
I respect honesty, priorities and transparency. I'd hire the guy. We aren't MBAs, after all: our goal isn't to hide behind a web of obscurity while we sell our clients bonds too toxic for us to hold. We want to hire people with side projects as long as they won't distract from their work for us.
He will have lost some crappy jobs at crappy companies that want cogs instead of collaborators. I don't think it's going to be a major disappointment for him.
From all we've read about Zynga they seem to fit the bill just shy of actually clubbing animals...
Imagine the viral traffic you could get when people have seen "moe clubbed two obnoxious baby seals" in your facebook ticker a few times an hour for a while.
Personally, I'd have no trouble hiring Shay Pierce. I like it when people I hire have some backbone and some moral sense. Obedience is occasionally useful, but making software is essentially a creative effort (as is starting a new company). For that, you need people who can think independently from the basis of shared values.
I mean, if you disagree with a potential employer's" values", it's career suicide to write a widely distributed Op-Ed about it unless that value is something like "Don't club baby seals" and you have hard proof that said employer is actively clubbing baby seals. Calling them evil over what is essentially a contract dispute (even if it's a perfectly valid contract dispute) would make me think twice before negotiating a contract with him. If he's writing an Op-Ed about them, what's to prevent him from writing an Op-Ed about me if he doesn't like my terms?