[djsumdog]

In a few cases I've had to ask for changes to the contract. I have never and will never sign a non-compete. I'll sign NDAs, and IP agreements and relinquish patent rights, but never will I sign something that dictates what I can or cannot do once no longer employed.

Once I walked away from a contract where they refused to remove the 1-year non-compete.

Another time I worked for a for a startup which had started out as an open source/volunteer project. After a big disagreement about the contract with the lawyer, the principal investor told me to 'sign the contract I wanted.' I refused to write my own contract and insisted the lawyer stop being insane and send me a contract without the non-compete section. She never did, but I started getting paid.

It worked out. The startup failed, I gutted the two commits that weren't mine and back-ported all the changes to the OSS version, keeping it all GPLv3.

TL;DR I accepted a job without accepting a job contract.

[URSpider94]

I take your point to be that you negotiated on your own behalf, which is great.

I think it's fair to say that very few people have the savvy to know that offer terms are negotiable, and further that very few people are employed in high-demand careers where they can negotiate their employment terms 1:1.

The companies have information asymmetry on their side, since these negotiations are performed sequentially and in private. Mathematically, the Nash Equilibrium looks very different for n sequential negotiations of "who will sign this non-compete?" vs a single all-or-nothing negotiation where the company ends up with <n|zero> employees.