[topkai22]

I worked for (and my wife still works for) a small company that provided a boutique set of engineering services. They had a non compete that was very narrowly tailored and called out by name the competitors that you couldn’t go work for directly (6 months or a year), all of which were also small companies.

That sort of non-compete that seems reasonable to me- very specific, time limited, and only for people with actual trade knowledge.

A good test is the number of openings a prohibition covers. The non-compete I signed covered maybe 30 openings nationwide in a good year, and zero in my local metro area.

[wpietri]

Why do you believe employers should be able to control who you work for when they're no longer paying you?

One easy test for contract fairness I learned from my lawyer is, "Would it make sense if it were symmetric?" So, e.g., would your employer also agree not to go after clients that your next employer has? Or would they agree not to hire any engineers you consider competitive with yourself while you're there and for a year after you leave?

My guess is no.

[challenger-derp]

Can anyone shed light as to why the push for symmetric non-competes isn't a movement?

[wpietri]

I think it's because most employees just have no interest in diminishing competition. And if they did, most don't have the bargaining power to make it happen. And that to me is what corporate non-competes are generally about: exercising power for gain, and nevermind who it hurts.

[MiddleEndian]

There's an easy solution to this: They can offer you some amount of money not to work for those competitors for 6-12 months, and you can accept it, deny it, or renegotiate it.

[shukantpal]

That money is the premium embedded in their income

[brundolf]

I think cases like this are super rare compared to the harmful cases, so it would still be a net gain for society

Also- most of the reasonable cases for noncompetes are already covered by trade secret/NDA stuff