...but are they enforceable?

It's funny how states like Washington are notorious for enforceable non-competes, to be "business friendly".

Meanwhile California bans non-competes, and its GDP is 4th largest in the world if it were a country!

"incumbent friendly" vs "startup friendly"

What exactly should one be on the lookout for? Practically every company has an IP confidentiality agreement.

This is a state level thing. As is whether IP produced outside of your job, on your own equipment, is yours.

I moved from New York to California a bit over 20 years ago in large part because I personally encountered this (the IP ownership bit), and preferred to live under California's rules.

It is worthwhile to read https://www.paulgraham.com/america.html. Point 7 talks about how easy it is for regulations to accidentally squash startups. I believe that the fact that California makes neither mistake causes us squash fewer startups. It is not sufficient to have made Silicon Valley a startup hub, but it was likely necessary.

So happy my union managed to ban broad non-competes in my country ~8 years ago. Now it needs to be very specific if they want to enforce it (not just "development work in the same industry" which most contracts had back when I graduated), only applicable for maximum a year, and they have to pay your salary for the time they stop you working somewhere else.

Have an employment attorney always look over said agreements before signing. A local acquaintance who did work for an MSP had said MSP try such a ploy, only for the employment attorney to sue and get it thrown out as unreasonable and unenforceable.

Never, EVER sign a contract without reading it first, and having your lawyer review it.

> They argue it would be impossible for you to work elsewhere in this industry during your entire career without violating confidentiality with the technical and business instincts you bring to that domain

In that case you need to ask for a lifetime worth of salary, including growth from being in position to be put in escrow before you sign the dotted line. Otherwise they can hire you and fire you immediately and you'd never be able to work in your field that you spent years/decades training for.

If I understand it right, those NDAs work as non-competes if “confidential” is defined as restricted just on the basis of some relationship to the business, which is pretty weird attack of legalese on common sense. Let’s say I used some relatively simple chain of thought to derive X about my job at Z. The fact that Z uses or does X is probably confidential, and that’s ok. This would be how I understood a broad definition. But what kind of reasoning would conclude that X is confidential per se, preventing me to use or do X elsewhere, effectively making doing my job impossible? It just doesn’t make sense.

I once declined a job offer because the non-compete made no sense. (It was many pages, claimed that I would be paid during the non-compete period, and impossible to read.) I basically concluded that they (the company) had a lawyer that was basically wanking off.

A few years ago an American company that approached me (UK based) about a job opportunity insisted I sign an NDA before I could interview with them. I refused and they couldn't understand why so they even put me in contact with one of their lawyers. I still refused, and they eventually relented, but I could never understand why I'd need to sign an NDA to attend a job interview. There's literally no benefit to me in doing so.

At the time I was working for a competitor and I figured they could use the fact that I interviewed with them to argue that I - either intentionally or unintentionally - gained proprietary knowledge of their product and my current employer gained from it.

OTOH, beware letting yourself be intimidated by scary looking but unenforcable clauses that are all over contracts. In doubt, spend a bit of money on a lawyer to figure out what your real situation is.

I know of several cases where lawyers said "don't bother arguing with them about clause X, just sign it and ignore it".

In some countries that's illegal. So when presented with a contract that contains such claims, I have 2 options:

1) ask them to remove it... and so I risk not getting the job

2) don't say anything, and sign it

If I'm really interested in the job, I'll go for option 2 because I know they cannot enforce such claims, so I'll be fine.

sounds crazy. in my country, adding anything that prevents you from finding work in the future to a contract is kind of invalid.

you do get non competes etc., but it never holds up in court as you can easily prove it prevents you from finding jobs.

i wish for you in your legislation there might be a similar law, otherwise these things are really evil. i mean, its like prison in some fields niche enough, and those are exactly the fields prone to such overly protective clauses