Noncompetes for hourly, non permanent employees are clearly abusive. Based on the experience of California, they don't hurt company performance and competitiveness for highly compensated engineers either. They are just another way to control people.

Washington state just banned them basically for people like sandwich makers but on amazon's advice, they made them supported by law for people who make a certain salary which looked basically to be targeted to software engineers. [1]

Also, amazon has enforced some non-competes on people who aren't vps [2]. So don't work at amazon. Seriously talk about this with amazon, if candidates talk to them about it they will knock it off. I know they rarely try to enforce them but they have so much more power and money they can throw their weight around, in the same way that this article talks about abusing weaker parties like interns.

[1] https://www.geekwire.com/2019/washington-state-legislators-p... [2] https://www.geekwire.com/2017/business-personal-amazon-web-s....