People in control of orgs and capital want to telegraph thought leadership via "we want to be the next Silicon Valley" without actually giving up control of workers or making the necessary system changes. For a parallel, see how Jamie Dimon says "AI could help bring about the 4 day work week." [1] Is JPMorgan Chase trying to move to a 4 day work week? No, of course not. Jamie likes to be important and have his proclamations disseminated, not actually make the change being used to chase clout and status (because once wealthy, there is nothing left to chase if one wants to chase something).

TLDR Talk is cheap, work and change is hard and painful (broadly speaking). Observe actions, not words.

[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/jpmorgan-ceo-jamie-dimon-says...

Non-competes are almost always unenforceable. Never take money (although even then, they're still mostly useless), and just ignore them and no one is going to do anything. That was what my business law professor taught us. No court is going to enforce a non-compete if it means the person who cannot compete is going to be unable to support themselves. The only time it'll be enforced is if you're already independently wealthy.

In other words, a completely useless scare tactic.

Is there actually substantial resistance to this? Or just a few manufactured counter-arguments from news outlets trying to do a both-sides take on this?

Non-competes have been heavily limited or outright voided in California. That's an easy and obvious rebuttal to the Silicon Valley argument.

There's a lot of opposition to pretty much any nigh objectively good thing for the people. Just follow the money. It usually comes down to

1. lobbyists vying for a company who wants to keep power

2. the legislature having its own vested interest from relationship/deal/lobbying

3. the minority of constituents are the ones who constantly call in and go to townhalls, because they have the time, money, or energy to do so compared to someone who's at work during a townhall.

What's the actual steel man argument for why noncompetes are good? I've never really encountered one, just seen the corporate advocacy that they don't want to deal with high employee turnover.

Best I can do: Non-competes are (possibly) unenforceable anyway, so signing one maybe acts as a value signal for the employee? "I'd have to violate my non-compete, so in order to do that and permanently burn the bridge with my current company, you need to pay me $X + $Y."

Frankly I don't buy it, though, because it assumes too much about the rationality of all actors involved and the savviness of the employee during negotiations.

This is not a mechanism to protect startups. This is a mechanism to protect the flow of ideas, whether the ideas are flowing from a big company to a startup or vice versa. Workers who find a big company bureaucratic should be able to launch a startup. Workers who find a small startup insufficiently resourceful should also join a big company to get resources.

Companies need to put more care into who they trust, and maybe incentivize skin in the game. If leaving for a competitor means you lose equity, agency, ownership, or some intangible, that can outweigh bigger paychecks.

The market should be able to solve this problem without the government setting arbitrary rules, and people should be allowed to sign contracts that limit or restrict their freedom, so long as it involves informed consent from all parties.

If Microsoft wants to hire an AI expert for a million dollars a year, and restrict him from competing for 2 years after leaving Microsoft so as to avoid losing market advantage, that seems like a reasonable thing for Microsoft to want. If all Apple has to do to get all the Copilot secrets is hire the chief copilot engineer for 1.5 million, seems like that creates a toxic dynamic and all but guarantees acquihires and a near immediate turnaround in a startup to corporate pipeline for raiding IP.

Maybe we should be limiting businesses to doing business at a scale they can responsibly handle. If you can't get human customer service for your computer issues because Windows and Mac have scaled far beyond the number of users they could ever hope to handle, maybe that market needs regulation, and unless they scale customer service accordingly, they don't get to target a majority of the world's population as their customer base?

That'd certainly create jobs and opportunities for Linux and induce a revolution in software markets, and it'd limit the incentives for MS and Apple and big tech to do shitty things to suppress the markets overall.

acquhire practicies show that yes - sometimes people really ARE the company. However, i think for the average C# developer, or Epson printer specialist or wordpress or Bosch controller analyst, these arent really true.

No big company is going to bother poaching that way. They are either going to purchase the company outright or undercut them with their own competing product to kill it off through attrition. We're not in the 2010's anymore where people are banging at the door for singular SWE's.

Small startups in California (where many, if not the majority, of tech startups are headquartered) do just fine without enforceable non-compete agreements.

It's also already unlawful to steal another company's assets when you leave. Besides, companies should file provisional patent applications as soon as they invent valuable proprietary technology to prevent the sort of subject matter leakage you mention.

Isn't that doable via stay on and holdback clauses?

Why? They started one successful business. It seems good for society if they go on to start another.

Inevitably, it's just the need for lawyers to intervene in "common sense" negotiations. It's never legal to do X, Y, Z, but if the business has all the lawyers and the employee has non, then it doesn't really matter whats legal; it's whose willing to exhaust the cash to fight the issue.

Which of course, is why unions are what's needed to properly negotiate employee-employer relationships, the same way a strong government is needed to negotiate corporate-civil relationships.

Americans, however, have decided that "individual freedom" is _soooooo_ valuable, that it only exists for people with enough cash to defend it.

Have fun trying that in CA.