> Sure, some things (like taking customer lists when you leave a company) are messed up and should be barred

Is it messed up? If you're a salesperson, and you've built the relationships with these customers is their loyalty to you, or to the company that you worked for? I had a personal trainer for a little while and he took all his clients to a new gym when he decided to contract with a different gym.

I don't know the answer to this. But it doesn't seem as clear cut to me.

Yeah, that's a fair interpretation.

But I think the way I look at it is in a sort of "work product" type way. If I'm employed by a company to write software, I'm the one who wrote it, but I agree that the software I write is the property of the company, and I can't take it with me when I leave.

Is a salesperson's "work product" those relationships, and does that make them the "property" of the company? I don't think it's reasonable to say that those relationships are solely between the customers and the salesperson; those relationships wouldn't work out in that way if the salesperson's company was selling garbage, or even just a product that those customers didn't want. That is, the good customer-salesperson relationship is both a function of the salesperson's personal skills, and of the good fit between the company's products and the customer.

Ultimately, though, whatever you agree to in writing when you start the job is what you should honor. I'm fine with the law protecting people from predatory practices by employers (of which I think non-competes qualify, and employees shouldn't be able to sign away a right to change jobs like that), but if an employee signs something that says any customer relationships belong to the company, then that seems like a reasonable thing to me.