I&#x27;ve worked for several startups (US and UK) where the contracts contained very broad restrictions like this non-compete. Fortunately my wife is a lawyer and has helped me to read and red-line them, and then push back and get these sections rewritten. This is something I would NEVER have thought to do by myself, and I don&#x27;t know many other tech people who do this either. I don&#x27;t know the legality of these clauses, but my impression is that the companies don&#x27;t really care - it&#x27;s easy to put overly restrictive language into their contracts because they have little to lose out of it, as an employee is unlikely to undergo expensive future litigation to sue over it.<p>Bottom line - there needs to be (a) some low cost support mechanism for people to be able to check whether their contracts contain anything overly broad that could hurt them later, and (b) some way of educating potential employees that they should read contracts in detail, and that they can challenge contracts and push for changes before signing them, and not to treat them as a binary sign as-is&#x2F;no-sign decision.