As with pensions [for civil servants] it should be the average of the last 3 years of compensation (e.g. W-2 take-home).

That's not how it works for civil servants either. Bonuses (signing and retention) are not factored into high-3. It's salary plus locality, not w2.

Bonuses also make pay lumpy, so employees wanting to quit have to wait for the next bonus date or walk away from X% of their income. Bonuses are also often late, so X is never 0 no matter when you quit.

The median in the sibling comment wouldn't work because unless bonuses are paid monthly the median will just be the base salary, so you'd have to do mean.

you could tailor it as appropriate, but also there should be legislation that limits the ability to call "bonuses" bonuses rather than regular income - if nothing else I believe withholding on bonuses is 50% vs. a sane rate that is closer to what you'd be paying if you're on a minimum-is wage job.

How about simply not having non competes

Bans are a big hammer and have unintended consequences in areas not given adequate consideration.

Requiring payment for the duration of the non-compete is perfect. You can tweak the specific requirements up/down as problems arise.

In most practical situations, requiring payment (of almost any amount) will eliminate non-competes, because employers generally don't like paying for labor they can't use.

Bans against non-competes in California work just fine and have contributed to creating a more dynamic innovative economy.

>have unintended consequences

What negative unintended consequences?

Requiring employers to pay for non-competes will be functionally equivalent to a ban. Nobody in their right mind will pay tens of thousands of dollars to enforce one.

Not true. This is called "garden leave" in the financial industry and is quite common. I believe the theory is that a lot of a trader's knowledge becomes obselete quite quickly, and it is cheaper to pay a former employee for a year or two then to let them use their strategies at a competitor.

Then it sounds like it wasn't worthwhile to begin with if the only risk was tens of thousands of dollars.

(I disagree with the downvotes here - this is a reasonable position if you have no context)

In practice, non-competes that pay out 200k+/yr are quite common in finance (think firms like 2 sigma, Jane Street). They will pay to keep people from going to competitors, mainly to keep their strategies and implementation details reasonably protected.

so you make it their median income for the past X months, which I had considered a given.

I also don't mean in response to a company enforcing it. A company would be required to pay that amount for the period covered. The employee could choose to offer them an out if the found a much better paying job, but that would necessarily not be at the discretion of the company.