Even in the states where these agreements are enforceable, they usually only are enforceable for a job in the same role, a competitive business, and the same physical location. I worked for a company for about a decade with an agreement like this; the people who left usually got out of it by lying about where they're going, working remotely for a while, or getting their next employer to change their title.

That's interesting. At first glance, I thought you were suggesting "just switch roles completely!" But, you aren't saying that, you are saying the new employer just needs to be clever in creating a role with a different name.

But, then again, for some roles a public presence is needed, like public speaking. You can't temporarily have the role of "janitor" and go out and speak authoritatively about AWS at a conference with that role. Maybe people will get the joke after understanding the true state of these agreements.

Wait, do we even have conferences anymore?

> You can't temporarily have the role of "janitor" and go out and speak authoritatively about AWS at a conference with that role.

It is my understanding that you can often get away with being a lot more subtle than that. Things like throwing a proprietary product name in your title, a title that sounds more like a manager, etc.

Not "AWS specialist" to janitor, but AWS to "cloud deployment engineer" or simply "member of technical staff "

lying is just never a good strategy. everyone talks.

Maybe. Are you important enough to get administrative attention after you're gone, or does your HR department only care as much as they have to complete their offboarding checklist?

People may talk, but the reality is that nobody is listening.

Companies are not sending private detectives, to follow engineers to their new job, and finding out specifically what they are working on, and if the contract is enforceable or not.

Mostly, people just forget about you, once you leave. People get away with lying all the time.

I forget the details because, frankly, it had no impact on me, but at one company, I remember a new executive simply not being able to fulfill some of the duties of his new role for several months until his non-compete expired. If the company wants you bad enough, they will find a way to make it work.

But you don't want to ever be put in that position.

When I was leaving Amazon, the logic was generally -- don't go to the same org in a different company. E.g. if you work in S3, don't go to Google Cloud Storage. If you land in ads or maps or search or whatever, that should be fine.

Though, it's really up to Amazon whether they want to keep you unemployed for 18 months, which is (in my mind) totally unethical to even have in the contract in the first place.

I and many of my colleagues worried about non competes at Amazon. But mine wasn’t enforced and I’ve never heard of a “rank and file” individual contributor or non-exec manager having it enforced. My impression is it’s only worth it for VPs or other very high level employees. But the scare tactics evidently do work, in terms of scaring employees to stay or to jump through extra hoops (moving states even if they don’t want to) to avoid enforcement.

Has anyone here had a company try to enforce their non compete, and can share their insights?

I've only heard of noncompete agreements being enforced out of spite against someone who has quit on bad terms, not because of a genuine interest for noncompetition.