The behavior depicted in Silicon Valley is (a humorous exaggeration of) the real response to California's prohibition on noncompetes. You can't force your emplo

The behavior depicted in Silicon Valley is (a humorous exaggeration of) the real response to California's prohibition on noncompetes. You can't force your employees not to jump ship, so instead, you pay them not to. Continuously, and competitively. At any time, said workers are free to go work for your competitors, so you need to actually compete to keep them, even if your only interest in them is having them not working on anything important. This is why Google has a dozen different applications that all do the same thing. Google didn't want high-level talent competing with them, so they just hired as many of the top developers as they could, and then paid them enough for them to be content working on miscellany.