From a practical standpoint, does anyone actually enforce the noncompetes against regular employees? It never struck me as worth the money and bad press to enforce something like this against an intern or regular line engineer or manager.
For instance: a tech company I used to work for, a well liked employee left to go work for a company he used to consult for. The owner threatened hard to sue. It made the papers, the lawsuit alone would have ended us, but now local companies didn’t want to sign either because our reputation tanked, and many of the employees threatened to quit.
Meh. Next time, have the new employer cover the legal costs. 5k is not much to spend when onboarding a new employee. That’s basically IT costs.
In the USA no significant tech company has any contractual notice period, and the social norm is to provide two weeks notice.
In fact, at Google the policy is that the maximum period an employee may continue is three weeks once they have handed notice of resignation.
I believe bizarrely long notice periods, commonly three months now, are a large contributing factor to the depressed wages in technology in the U.K.
When friction is applied to the labor market, it’s to the detriment of the employees.