I’m fairly confident that at least certain employers who have deep pockets and are obsessed with non-competes (like that EMR) company would spend many, many tim

I’m fairly confident that at least certain employers who have deep pockets and are obsessed with non-competes (like that EMR) company would spend many, many times someone’s annual salary to ruin them for daring to try to work in an even tangentially similar industry (such as wearable health hardware) before their non-compete expires. That specific company is delusional about where their profit comes from; they (specifically their founder/CEO and the surrounding execs) think it’s because of their awesome “ultra secret” technology and not a combination of regulatory and inertial lock-in. Like, they literally think their MUMPS codebase and the non-relational database backing it are what make them great, rather than something they’re successful in spite of. (And it does, to the degree that it encodes a huge amount of domain knowledge—derivative domain knowledge, based on the law, regulation, and insurance policies…)