Garden leave is a different beast and seems fair, you and the employer each get something, non competes on the other hand do not usually offer anything to the employee.
Can confirm this was the case in the US, made me promise myself to never take another software engineer role at a non “tech” company ever again which I’ve held to ever since.
They outsourced every possible role in software engineering and IT to India to the bare minimum where all that was left were the devs who worked on the firmware for gov related projects and regulatory concerns meant only US citizens could work on it. For the devs that were left, it was an uphill battle for resources and salaries while it felt like Sales and marketing were put on a pedestal when this company’s entire product was our work.
I love the direction this wants to go in. So many of these are reasons why we've banned new shell scripts on our projects and instead make python scripts.
Starter salaries for new software development or RE/VR grads, straight out of college with 1-2 summer internships under their belt, is 80-100k. These are not your I got poached by FAANGs MIT or Stanford grads we're talking about, just regular UMD/Mason, etc... working at cyber contractors or small-medium size tech companies.
One of my coworkers used to live her dream of living in Amsterdam doing dev work for a year, while the experience was very relaxed and it was a fun city, she said she couldn't justify getting paid 30-40k a year in Europe when the pay was triple here.
Our HQ (over 3k people) is in the LA area, CEO posted on slack offering up to 10k for any fire related relocation costs during this time.