> I will pay you X times your a salary to not start a competitor for 2 years, should that be legal?
What about joining an existing competitor? How is "competitor" defined? Is it competition if someone left Apple's iWork team to join Microsoft's Office team? Or just left Apple to join Microsoft even if it's in a non-competing, or even a team that's actually beneficial to Apple's bottom-line (e.g. Azure, as iCloud runs on Azure+AWS+GCP)?
...these difficulties in nailing down "competition" is what leads to overly broad and ultimately unconscionable noncompete agreements.
Ultimately I wouldn't trust an employer to define it for me - so if I were in that position I'd tell them I'd treat a noncompete as a gardening-leave clause and require 200% my final TC for the same time period (so 4x my salary for 2 years) - if my ability to compete with the company is really worth that much then they'll gladly have no problems paying it - and if they don't, then they're clearly a company that wants to exert undue interference (i.e. punishment?) on former employees for no good reason and I'd interview somewhere else.
What about joining an existing competitor? How is "competitor" defined? Is it competition if someone left Apple's iWork team to join Microsoft's Office team? Or just left Apple to join Microsoft even if it's in a non-competing, or even a team that's actually beneficial to Apple's bottom-line (e.g. Azure, as iCloud runs on Azure+AWS+GCP)?
...these difficulties in nailing down "competition" is what leads to overly broad and ultimately unconscionable noncompete agreements.
Ultimately I wouldn't trust an employer to define it for me - so if I were in that position I'd tell them I'd treat a noncompete as a gardening-leave clause and require 200% my final TC for the same time period (so 4x my salary for 2 years) - if my ability to compete with the company is really worth that much then they'll gladly have no problems paying it - and if they don't, then they're clearly a company that wants to exert undue interference (i.e. punishment?) on former employees for no good reason and I'd interview somewhere else.