[dunpeal]

Of course. It also encourages competition, especially from new startups.

Imagine Facebook had to wait for a couple of years to be able to hire any senior engineers with the knowledge and skills to scale their services.

They would lose momentum, and quite possibly fail as their service would be constrained by severe scaling and reliability issues.

The reason Facebook and other unicorns were able to thrive in SV is because they were able to poach dozens of experienced engineers from other companies, that are all arguably its competitors.

If you like startups, non-competes are some of your worst enemies.

[EliRivers]

Didn't some of them (Apple, Intel, Google and more) get busted for agreeing under the counter to not hire each others employees?

https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-google-others-settle-anti-po...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-lawsuit/steve-jobs-...

[atq2119]

Yes, but they did so at a time when none of them could reasonably have been described as startups. GP's point was about startups.