Competing anecdotes here and both can be true, but as someone working in the industry since the 1990s I personally never noticed any particular bias against peo

Competing anecdotes here and both can be true, but as someone working in the industry since the 1990s I personally never noticed any particular bias against people due to the prior company associations during this time period. People who lost jobs due to their companies going out of business were pretty SOL during this stretch of time (early 2000s), but in my experience the problem wasn't bias against them due to prior employers but rather that hardly anybody was hiring at all. Almost everyone (that wasn't busy filing for bankruptcy) was in a hiring freeze holding pattern waiting for the sky to stop falling.