[lazide]

Because employees can be shitty people too. See my comment upthread about an up close and personal view I had to one such shitty employee.

What you seem to be advocating is to never allow a company<-> employee to have a non compete clause, even if the company is happy to pay for it.

Which yikes. Do you think what Levandowski did with Waymo/Uber helped anyone? Including ‘society’ overall?

[michaelmrose]

I don't care what they are happy to pay for. There are plenty of other tools available to protect the interests of companies. For example Levandowski stole trade secrets and is being sued for 9 figures and indicted. You couldn't have picked a worse example of the need for post employment non-competes if you tried.

Likewise your other example is an employee taking an employees money and their customers at the same time. It would have been sufficient to bar him from competing and working against the employers interests WHILE he was there.

If he had quit and called prior customers and said I know you do business with blank but I can do better would that really have been wrong?