Should be a requirement that, to be enforceable, a non-compete must pay the agreeing employee his salary for the duration of the agreement.
Say you start as a junior at 80k , next year you get an offer for 150k , but you can't take it. You'd end up with a large 1 year resume gap, and losing 70k.
The year of career stagnation wouldn't be worth it.
- Get a Master's degree
- Travel and see the world
- Do consulting
- Take a job in Indonasia
- Teach
- Develop a new open source project
- Etc.
The resume gap / career stagnation is a choice. It's rare that you can have a gap year like this. I totally don't feel bad about paid non-competes.
You'd might rather have more money. If you desperately need to increase your income even paid non competes are a bad deal
In a world where non-competes were funded 100% it seems like it should be the GOAL of every employee to be fired from a position where a non-compete needs to be enforced in order to secure extended paid vacations.
Really, companies should have to pay >100% salary as a disincentive to idling valuable labor.
If they're going to do it at all, and limit cruelty in the equation as much as possible, it should be very limited to directly comparable and competing products (Windows vs MacOS; Google Search vs Bing; consumer desktop operating systems and consumer search as narrow categories), rather than the industry broadly. Most people have a narrow labor specialization and spend their work years building up expertise and reputation in an industry. Any denial of work potential and opportunity that targets an entire industry is akin to labor cruelty and should be viewed as a human rights violation.
Biologist/chemist working on novel drugs - pretty limited field.
Developer at Amazon - Amazon does a bit of everything, I bet their legal team would prefer you didn't work elsewhere.
As noted elsewhere, it's not even so much about an NDA/non-compete is enforceable - just the threat of legal action is enough to stop employees moving or stop other employers hiring people.
I imagine these people have money, so what's making potentially an extra 200k? You make that in a year.
These are not typical people.
Would you sign a contract that says I have the right to point a gun at you at all times, with only my unofficial assurances that I won't pull the trigger?
You might not be getting the annual bonus (which is a major chunk of pay in finance), but you still get the full salary for the duration of the non-compete (usually 12-18mo). They also usually have a clause that it applies only to jobs in the same industry, so if you go from a finance shop to a FAANG company or another tech startup, then the non-compete is void, and you are welcome to pursue that opportunity without any 12-18mo timeouts (but your non-compete pay stops).
That seems to be a reasonable compromise, because if you really want to continue working in finance, you are welcome to wait for 1-1.5 years while getting paid full salary (minus the annual bonus) for doing nothing. And if you want to start working again immediately, you are welcome to do so, as long as it is in an industry other than finance, and the non-compete pay stops (because non-compete at this point becomes void).