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I certainly understand why companies do this, but often these non-competes are so overly broad to a point of being farcical. When I was at Apple, in my free time, I started hacking on a clone of Plex Server. I had gotten multiple emails around the time saying that open-source policies have changed, and every open source contribution needs to be approved by the VP of technology, which sufficiently scared me. I managed to get a meeting with the VP of tech when I was in California, and while he was extremely polite, his response was that because my project dealt with video, and Apple sells video, it's therefore competitive, so I need to immediately stop working on it. [1] It honestly kind of soured my opinion of the company, and I subsequently became a kind of crappy worker, because I stopped really caring if I made Apple better. I stayed on for about 1.5 years after that, and accomplished very little in the aftermath. If he had just let me open source my stupid project that, lets be honest, would not have diverted a single dollar away from Apple, I think they would have gotten much better work from me by the end of my time there. [1] Yes, obviously I could work on it in secret, and maybe it was a fools errand to ask permission on this, but I really didn't think Apple was going to be so overly broad with their definition of "competitive". |