If you believe that a company should be able to have any say whatsoever on what a person does after they've left the employ of that company, then yes, you are unreasonable.
Edit:
I'm rate limited, but the replies below me claiming that China has no obligation to abide by our patents are mistaken. They've signed up to various treaties that do require them to respect American patents. They choose not to, and we mostly choose not to retaliate for it, for many reasons. Maybe we should.
If your scenario were what companies by in large used non competes for then I doubt anyone would have a problem. But in the meantime they're mostly using it to fuck people over en mass. Maybe if they behaved like adults, but in the modern business environment where anything legal is good, sometimes you need to take away the toys from entities that basically act like a bunch of toddlers.
But there are reasonable restrictions for lower-pay workers too. E.g. requiring that your secretary not work at your direct competitors for two years after leaving. Secretarial jobs at your competitors are probably a tiny fraction of the whole market for those jobs.
Replying here because I'm rate-limited: Because your secretary might know a great deal about your business strategy and plans.
Peon (aka almost everyone reading HN) non-competes almost never include any kind of compensation. Companies rarely pay above-market rates or offer to pay anything during the non-compete period. They basically slip it into the employment agreement because they can.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander, don't you think? In the legal world it's called "consideration", as in courts often invalidate contractual provisions or whole contracts unless there is some kind of consideration, and especially when the balance of power is tilted.
The only acceptable non-compete is where they pay you to not work for a competitor.
This is how it works in banking
Around here noncompete clauses are fine but nobody include them anymore as the company might have to pay salary for the employee for the entire noncompete period all while the emploee is free to go on paid leave or take any other work as long as it is not targeted by the agreement. (At least this is my understanding of the explanation I got from a former boss when I asked why that clause was removed from my revised contract.)
This gives the full liberty for the employer to gave non-compete clauses only it assures they don't add them willy-nilly just because they can. For high-profile cases like you mention this seems like a perfect deal, doesn't it?
That must explain why there have never been any innovative search engines from California, where non-competes are null and void.
Non-competes exist to temporarily protect a company from a former employee taking advantage of the secret knowledge they have. The fair thing here is to pay employees for that time.
The main objection is that you're expected to help protect their business without any compensation.
I'd expect some would go somewhere different (e.g. leave Intel to work at AWS learning more deeply about what people do with those chips before jumping back), be grossly underpaid helping their favorite charity, take classes/do research, etc.
I agree these things are overused and need to be reigned in, but let's not oversimplify.
>relatively rare
I'd say it's the opposite. Only a small percent of trade secret theft has any chance of being directly enforced against.
As for “relatively rare”, most claimed trade secrets aren't as sensitive (or hard to independently reinvent) as people like to think. When the cost is subsidized to almost nothing, people will claim everything is critical but as soon as they have to pay for it, they'll focus on things which actually matter.
That ""500k a year noncompete" is a great hypothetical, but it doesn't happen in this world, so we shouldn't worry too much about sacrificing it to improve performance of a hotspot.
I absolutely do. There is no justification whatsoever that a company should be able to keep me from working in my chosen field, and as a result unable to feed my family, just because they're insecure.
Your business has no right of any kind to exist. Period.
Isn't that how the "invisible hand" of the "free market" (or some such garbage) is supposed to work?
If all your current employer wanted was to get a head start in the market, they let you walk for the 1M. If you're still providing them great value and/or letting their competitor in on it would be worth more than that to them, they can beat the offer.
Maybe you'd have separate reasons for wanting to leave (though "I want to reimplement the thing I just built again" doesn't seem to be the most common reason to leave a place), but in that case why are the company's reasons more important than your own, to the point that they should be legally protected?
That said, this does seem to be an edge case, where the general rule causes more harm than good.
As for direct competitors, Non Disclosure Agreements work just fine.