The case for banning non-competes
There are two kinds of non-competes, and both have problems.<p>First, there&#x27;s the really nasty ones saying &quot;If you ever work here, you can&#x27;t work for any competitor for X years&quot;, and they&#x27;re clearly abusing of employees, labor, etc. I hope there is a straight up ban on that.<p>The second kind is &quot;You can&#x27;t compete with us while you work here&quot;. And that is a much more complex beast. Obviously, if I work as a developer making a stock trading app, I shouldn&#x27;t be making a competing stock trading app after hours.<p>But my employer does <i>everything</i>. There is no field that my employer is not involved in, somehow. You can guess who they are, probably, or just read my profile. And they say &quot;You cannot do anything that competes with anything we do&quot;. Which is everything. Want to make a Sudoku app? That&#x27;s a game, we do games. Want to do some open source ML library work? We do ML, you can&#x27;t do ML outside of work (I asked legal that one). And that&#x27;s ignoring the who-knows-how-many secret un-released projects that <i>might</i> relate.<p>They don&#x27;t even tell us &quot;no&quot; anymore. They just say &quot;read the non-compete agreement and do what it says&quot;. Basically &quot;do what you like, but if we ever feel like it wasn&#x27;t right, you&#x27;re fired and maybe sued&quot;.<p>And when I apply to other companies, they ask &quot;do you have a github account?&quot;. No, I&#x27;ve been highly motivated not to.<p>Edit: eesh, this was a bit of a rant, wasn&#x27;t it? Apologies for that. But maybe folks have ideas on what to do about it, apart from the obvious.