The case for banning non-competes

First, there's the really nasty ones saying "If you ever work here, you can't work for any competitor for X years", and they're clearly abusing of employees, labor, etc. I hope there is a straight up ban on that.

The second kind is "You can't compete with us while you work here". And that is a much more complex beast. Obviously, if I work as a developer making a stock trading app, I shouldn't be making a competing stock trading app after hours.

But my employer does everything. There is no field that my employer is not involved in, somehow. You can guess who they are, probably, or just read my profile. And they say "You cannot do anything that competes with anything we do". Which is everything. Want to make a Sudoku app? That's a game, we do games. Want to do some open source ML library work? We do ML, you can't do ML outside of work (I asked legal that one). And that's ignoring the who-knows-how-many secret un-released projects that might relate.

They don't even tell us "no" anymore. They just say "read the non-compete agreement and do what it says". Basically "do what you like, but if we ever feel like it wasn't right, you're fired and maybe sued".

And when I apply to other companies, they ask "do you have a github account?". No, I've been highly motivated not to.

Edit: eesh, this was a bit of a rant, wasn't it? Apologies for that. But maybe folks have ideas on what to do about it, apart from the obvious.

For most employees, a lost lawsuit means you lose 2 years of your life, get PTSD, and go bankrupt. You might recover legal fees after you've lost the house. Yay!

If you've got a megabuck, you're okay. If you live paycheck to paycheck, you're SOL. If you're a high-income / low-savings immigrant from a low-income country, you're SOL too. You settle. It doesn't matter if they have no case. You settle.

As a footnote, this dynamic does play out re: grad students versus elite universities, under NDA. Source: I know MIT does this from first-hand knowledge, and I have suspicions about a few peer schools.

Bullshit. If you could fuck off to any of a dozen companies doing similar work, your employee would have to pay you well and give you raises and treat you well in order to compel you to stay, otherwise you would leave.

If employers had a magic button they could press to make it so that those dozen employers are too scared to hire you, or to make it so that you're worried about getting sued if you leave, then you will be more likely to stay at your employee, even if they treat you poorly and never give you a raise.

The non-compete agreement is that button, and making you feel like you're captive and can't do anything about it is the real reason why companies like to mash it. They like being able to mistreat you with impunity.