[wikibob]

It’s far less reasonable.

If you are skilled in being the chief of staff at google maps, it is likely your highest market value is in that particular niche.

Restricting your employment opportunities to those where you don’t have the highest market value through the use of non-competes is absolutely unethical and needs to be banned.

[ClumsyPilot]

its not about ethics - its theft. They are fraudulently manipulating the market for competitive salaries in a particular job.

It should be treated in the same way as other kinds of market fraud, insider trad8ng and rigging are treated.

[ShredKazoo]

I think the argument would be that if Google knows that Bing could hire its chief of staff at any time, that will cause Google to invest less in R&D because that R&D could fairly easily be obtained by a competitor.

I assume intellectual property law is sufficient to cover this case in practice though, because Silicon Valley is in California where noncompetes are unenforceable, and Silicon Valley is not exactly known for lack of R&D investment.