It is obvious from your simplistic comment that you need to acquire a much broader perspective before being able to interject with value in a conversation on this topic.
It is clear from your original comment that you both missed the point and likely do not understand the matter enough to, well, make the comment you made.
Go hire someone who isn't qualified. Spend a year and a million dollars training them. Then see them go work for your competitor. Then, maybe then, you could have an opinion worth listening to.
Here's another one: Go use credit cards to pay salaries and take out a second mortgage to keep your business afloat during an economic depression (both of which I had to do in 2008) and then come back and see if you understand.
To simplify it for you, one of the things I said was that non-competes MIGHT (not DO, MIGHT) create a feedback mechanism that cause companies to avoid hiring people who need to be trained, for the simple reason that the training is valuable in time and money and the last thing they want is for those employees to jump ship as soon as they have gone through such training.
It's a simple matter of survival: If you are a small company or a startup, it would be suicidal. You are not in business to train people for your competitors or the industry. That's just a simple fact. You do that too many times and you are out of business.
And, again, to be clear, I don't like non-competes and advise everyone who asks not to sign them (if they live somewhere where they might be legal). It's a bad idea. However, once again, I understand why a small to medium organization might thing them to be essential when hiring people who need to be trained for the job.
If only employee retention were not an inscrutable black box. What are the poor job-creators to do in the face of ungrateful, capricious employees who can at anytime for unfathomable reasons like "more remuneration", "recognition", or "better working conditions". Perhaps one day someone in the social sciences will do research in this uncharted corner of human psychology, and 50 years later, employers will know what to do.
I've seen colleagues uproot their lives by moving across the country and be laid off before they got their 3rd paycheck. I have worked under a toxic manager brought in at a startup for the express purpose of increasing attrition, amd afterwards looked at his linked in an realized that was his speciality: a contractor brought in to shake engineering teams to see what falls. The power imbalance, and rate of abuse between employers and employees are clear to me.
