[ghaff]

These discussions often get very binary.

As you say, California companies have a ton of things they can pull on departing employees--especially if those employees did take IP or client lists out the door with them.

In addition, while signing non-competes and having them stringently enforced isn't quite a man bites dog situation in other states, it's very far from universal. Only time I had one was while I was briefly working for EMC (big non-compete advocate) who acquired the company I was working for. And, in that case, the non-compete only applied to becoming an executive of a storage vendor.

I wasn't aware of non-competes being a widespread thing in the MA computer industry at the time. The company I worked for was actually founded by an ex-DEC engineer. That said, I'm happy to see the current pushback. They definitely have a chilling effect on especially small firms hiring people because they're seen as a risk. The very small company I worked for over a number of years saw any non-compete as a hard pass.

[garbagecoder]

What I have told people, both as a business owner and as an advisor to others is, there's this magical thing you can do to keep employees from moving to other companies. It almost always works. If it doesn't work, you can try the second thing.

Wages and working conditions.

No one wants to hear that because they want a magic piece of paper that makes all problems solved for cheap.

[ghaff]

>It almost always works.

Maybe.

Wages can be hard if you end up having to compete with FinTech, BigTech, and some other fields--or even just some company that really wants a person.

And working conditions covers a lot of ground. People just get itchy feet even when conditions aren't objectively bad. Or they liked the company when it was smaller but it has outgrown them.

But I'll agree that companies change and people change, and both should just be prepared to move on when the mutual bargain no longer works.