[avsteele]

Look, I understand most of you here are on the employee side, but please try and think through how this works in the real-world. And not for mega-corps, but smaller business who have ~0% chance of litigating a trade secrets case.

There are dozens of small optimizations in my tech that where painstakingly discovered through years of research and iterative improvement. These are not cost-effectively patentable.

Even if you believe the trade secrets 'work' do you think companies are going to document every design of optics, electronics, laser frequencies, rf powers? Then if we did then we'd get a series of posts about how onerous the regular confidential info acknowledgement forms are for the employee.

Not to mention, once it becomes 'commonly known' via disclosure, it may not even be protectable anymore.

Non-competes sidestep all these issues. Sure, if they are overly broad its bad, but they have an important role to play.