Maybe not for much longer at this rate, though. They seem to be doing everything possible to kill their tech industry rather than grow it. California indisputably has the best tech industry in the country and it also has the most stringent regulations against non-competes; it really makes you wonder what the legislators are even thinking if cultivating their tech industry is something they actually killed about.

Also, Idaho is a Republican state, so you naively expect they'd be all rah-rah free market and competition, but this appears to just be pro-big-business and actually quite anti-competitive.

I live in Boise, and work at a software startup.

I personally do not think this will have much of an effect on the "startup scene" because the vast majority of the people working at companies that would possibly enforce non-competes such as Micron or HP do not come to work at "startups", because of performance on skills-tests or cultural fit.

I've met a lot of the leadership for various startups in the Treasure Valley, and suing someone over changing employers would be the antithesis of the values they hold, there is one exception I could think of - BlackBox VR (very early stage) somebody leaving them for a competitor could be pretty bad!

I have met startups brag about losing employees to Amazon and Google though.

I don't think that the startup tech companies and non-startup tech companies are that different of a world. Something that negatively influences one in a given area will negatively influence the other. And people do move between them quite frequently (this has been my experience in DC and NYC at least, I can't speak to Boise).

What it's economy is like and what it's popularly imagined to be are two different things. Your nitpick actually undermines the very awareness you're trying to create because it misses the semantic mark.