That is in the US. A lot of people have those clauses over here in Europe too. The difference is that here, those clauses are not valid, or rather they are only semi-valid. If my employer wanted to enforce it, there would be a way, but then the employer would have to pay me for not working for the competitor. I work for company A, which competes with B. I get a job at B. A say I can't work for B. I say, sure, I will not work for B for a full year, during which A will pay my salary for not working... you can imagine that in practise this means that those clauses are only ever being enforced in cases such as "head of sales".... America is a fantastic place, but your legal system scares me. Just because it is in the contract it shouldn't always be valid. And the only way to get the clauses tossed is to go to court and spend everything you will ever earn in a lifetime...
How can you dare go into business when employee nr 1, 2 and 3 you hire all have to be lawyers... at least that is how it comes across from outside.
I love Apple, their products and the stocks. But if this case has merits, they should pay.
Cheers
/Peter
In California, non-compete agreements are illegal and unenforceable. An employee can not be held to any non-compete agreement he signs in California and generally, even if you sign a non-compete elsewhere, leave the job, and move to California to take a new position at a competitor, you have a pretty decent chance of winning in court. That said, such is expensive, so better to just live in California from the start.
The concerns above about trade secrets are silly. Theft of trade secrets is illegal, and can and will be prosecuted. It is actually generally quite easy to prove trade secret theft, unless the receiving company doesn't take any benefit from the theft (in which case, no harm done). But, a non-compete just because the company thinks the employee is going to violate trade secrets law when they go to work somewhere else is ludicrous with shades of Minority Report sprinkled over the top.
In any case, non-competes don't apply to a large number of the employees who are a part of the class of this suit, because they live in or would have gone to work in California.
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I bet none of the people defending Apple right now have ever worked in a technical capacity and are definitely not engineers. Engineers don't get treated like gold covered, chocolate smelling, happiness ornaments. We get treated almost like service employees.
We have to meet grueling deadlines.
We are paid salary so that there's a flexible bending on our overtime compensation.
We are subjected to draconian, almost slave-like relationships with our employers.
We are managed by people who never spent a day in any calculus or physics courses, who gets paid more than we do and sits in an office that we can see from our 45 square foot cubicle.
We have very limited room for growth.
And we are strong armed into very limiting non-compete clauses and anti-poaching agreements that basically render it impossible for us to work for a competitor if our company fires us or if we decide to quit.
Being an engineer only pays off in start-up climates.
Well when you say it like that ...
Seriously, though, it sounds like you need a better employer. I've been a software engineer for almost twenty years now and have successfully avoided most of the situations you say are commonplace (even when I was not in California, I worked for three different companies and only ever signed a non-compete clause once, and that time was for a very specifically-defines type of company directly competing not just with the company I was to work for but with my specific division). I get paid more than my boss. And, I've never been in a start-up climate.
So, just as a counter-point, being an engineer isn't all that bad, so long as you are at least as selective in choosing your employer as they are in selecting you.
