The one company I turned down was for 18 mo. No trade secrets were involved, and it was a very low management position. Not even a large company. They wanted to deter people from quitting. If I had taken the job and quit, I would not have been able to work "in that field for 18 months" which is a very broad stroke they painted with.
Obviously it differs from state to state...
Here in Ohio, they're generally not allowed to extend past 1 year
Explore the impact of an Ohio non-compete agreement on independent contractors and the potential consequences for employers. Get guidance from a DGMS lawyer.
ohiotiger.com
It's one of those things that's a double edged sword, it can protect the workers in some instances, but can protect the established "powers that be" in others.
For instance, if a nasty CEO wants to punish employees for leaving, they can leverage a non-compete agreement to punish people for leaving.
On the other hand, without any non-compete agreements, if Jeff Bezos gets wind of an idea that a much smaller company has that could be a "game-changer", absent a non-compete agreement, there's nothing that would stop him from simply saying "I'll give you a 50k signing bonus if you quit there and come work for me, that idea will be Amazon's now"
Which is why I noted earlier that there needs to be a "meet in the middle" solution of some kind here...
If we were starting from scratch in an environment where there were no established business super powers, and everyone's at the same starting line, then I can see where a
no non-competes allowed model would be preferable.
But I think people need to consider the dynamic of "preventative vs. prescriptive". That's where the libertarian party lost me on a lot of topics.
Things that would be good preventative measures to prevent certain forms of overstepping would be great if everything was starting from scratch. Once entities have already built a critical mass, things are a little different.
You nix any/all non-compete agreements, sure, that will give workers more options, but those other options are almost always going to be offered by "the big guys", who A) probably aren't going to treat them a whole lot better than the places they were already working for, and B) can easily dangle a $2k carrot in front of someone to steal them away from a much smaller company before they can even get off the starting line.
To be clear, there's virtually nobody working at $25k a year job who could be making $100k a year "if it weren't for those darn non-compete clauses"
My stance is still that they should be allowed, but structured in a way where they make sense. The requirement of "your previous employer who enacted the non-compete has to pay you your salary for the duration of that agreement" solves a lot of those problems organically.
At the end of they day, those people running the companies speak the language of money, and they're not going to want to shell that out for 6 months for a person who does literally no damage by going somewhere else.