Will noncompetes go extinct?

We can only hope. They make it harder on the employee and allow the employer to be lazy and cheap. There are other ways to protect the business's interest without making it unnecessarily difficult for the individual to change jobs. On top of that, it just breeds a workforce that is only there because they have nowhere else to go, not because they want to be there doing good work for the employer. Or as the article quotes "...suppress new ideas, and rob the American economy of dynamism." It seems like the "free market" is doing alot of this these days. This is what happens when we let the MBAs be in charge of things.

More'n likely . . .

I left an electronics service company in y 20s.The owner sad that I couldn't go after his customers. A few weeks later, the head of eminence for their largest customer knock on my door at home to ask me to take their work because the techs they tried to replace me with were morons. I told him bout the agreement, so the Superintendent called him to fie him and tell them that they had sent the head of maintenance to drive every street in my part of town to look foe my truck.
It was a large school system, I soon had all four systems in my area, because they called other systems to ask who did their work.
I needed to replace a custom rotary switch on a lot of intercoms. I had to go to the Dukane authorized dealer for the region.
The owner cornered me to ask who had taken over my area. I shrugged, "I just have four customers. They considered each department or school as a seperate customer. I considered who signed the checks as my customer.
I also bought entire used intercom consoles from them at the Cincinnati Hamfest dirt cheap. I overhauled each section so I could offer a fla rate exchange instead of waiting for some parts. I did my work so well, that all the work dried up..I did most calls onsite and in one trip. That Dukane dealer took up to six visits with a $150 trip charge and systems could be down for weeks. They 'designed' an upgrade to the system at my high school in the mid '60s. They claimed to be run by Electrical Engineers, but they couldn't figure out why the addition amplifiers caused excessive distortion and ow volume. Sim They were 80 degrees out of phase but change a couple wire at he output transformers would have fixed the problem I wasn't a tech, I was n engineer who did actual troubleshooting and design work.