Agreed on the first kind. It kind of sort of makes sense in the original context: say I run a bakery. I put it up for sale. You think it's a pretty good deal, s

Agreed on the first kind. It kind of sort of makes sense in the original context: say I run a bakery. I put it up for sale. You think it's a pretty good deal, so we agree and I sell the bakery to you. Then I take the money you paid me to renovate the building across the street, hire your employees out from under you. Customers quickly learn that the "original" moved across the street, and I'm laughing all the way to the bank. A noncompete that says, "I promise not to open a bakery within 40 miles in in the next 3 years" is pretty reasonable. However, the concept deteriorates with the internet, where there's no reasonable equivalent of a 40 mile radius, so the terms become "just don't use your expertise for X years". Noncompetes for employees are much more dubious. If my head chef wants to try and pull the same trick on me, it's his investment at risk... If he's really that motivated to undercut me, maybe I should think long and hard about why. The only variant I could see being okay with is if the term starts at the start of the employment. That is, if you leave after 2 months, you can't compete for 22 months, but if you stay the full 2 years, nothing stops you. (I still don't like that, but it's tolerable). I'm not sure about the second type of noncompete. Is it the problem, or is the problem that your employer does everything? I suspect both, and a fairer version would restrict the noncompete to "stuff that you work on directly". Or maybe the noncompete should have to specify the bounds and wouldn't be enforceable if they're too broad, similar to patents... on second thought, never mind. In any case, I'd first like to see whether it's still overly restrictive if companies were capped to some reasonable size.