Todd Bishop at Geekwire writes:

Amazon is suing a former Amazon Web Services strategic partnerships manager, Zoltan Szabadi, alleging that his new job at Google Cloud Platform violates the terms of a non-compete agreement that he signed when he originally joined Amazon.

The suit will be closely watched in the tech industry as a new test of the standard employment agreements that Amazon and some other large tech companies require employees to sign when they’re hired, restricting their activities if they leave.

I'm fascinated by non-compete deals. They can't be legal, right? They seem to simultaneously violate both labor laws and the idea of the free market that Silicon Valley claims to adore. Lately, I've seen more and more anecdotal suggestions that they're not legally enforceable, but Amazon must be fairly confident in their noncompete clause to take on this case. I can't wait to see how this one shakes out.