I have not experienced this but there is an article on NJ. com that really dives into non compete agreements. It talks about the impact of these agreements on people who are seeking to switch jobs. “One-third of the engineers who changed jobs left their industry altogether, often taking pay cuts, to comply with the agreement” Or employees may seek a new job with a bigger company that promises to indemnify them in case of litigation. The article goes on to says that non competes presented to employees are typically legally unenforceable and are judged based on the vague legal concept of reasonableness, and subject to judge-made interpretations of this reasonableness test.

http://www.nj. com/jobadvice/2015/04/non-compete_agreements_under_m. html