The FTC plans to curtail the use of non-compete clauses
In the instance this change doesn't go through it is important to be aware that non-competes don't survive hardship tests.  There is an extreme burden on the employer to prove that there are appropriate jobs available to the former employee that wouldn't violate the non-compete or (and this is much more common for "serious" non-competes in the modern world) provide partial compensation to the employee for the term of the non-compete.  Additionally, for the survivability requirements above non-competes need to be <i>extremely specific</i> you can't ask a software dev not to use a computer or even ask an aerospace engineer to find a job outside of a defense contractor (since that's an overwhelming proportion of the available jobs - a more appropriate restriction might be prohibiting them from working on a list of specific projects that are direct competitors with the project they were working on for you).<p>I wouldn't be sad to see the later form survive to be honest - there are a few situations where non-competes may be justified from a business perspective... but I think it's fair for companies to be on the hook for continued compensation at some proportion of the employee's former wage to actually exercise the privilege to deny the employee work in a specific field.  But hey - better non-competes die than we allow the current chilling-effect bullshit of overly vague and broad non-competes that are never intended to see the inside of a courtroom.