I'm not entirely sure how this compares to the situation under German (EU?) law:
Generally noncompetes are fairly widespread to varying extents. The default seems to be that you can't compete with your employer while you are employed (whether it's by freelancing on the side, poaching their customers or directly working for another competitor) though in practice employers will generally grant you permission to have a side-job as long as there's no conflict of interest and it doesn't impact your job performance.
However noncompetes terminate once the employment ends. The only way to extend the duration of the noncompete is by having the contract also reimburse you for the duration of that extended noncompete. Both sides can agree to lift that extension but if it's in the contract, the employer will likely have to pay for a certain amount of time whether they want to enforce the noncompete or not.
So in other words, while there may be scenarios where noncompetes impact your ability to find another job while still employed, the second your employment terminates, you're either free or continually being paid an appropriate sum of money.
As a freelancer I had clients that insisted on some form of noncompete, but these were generally only protecting them from me "skipping the middleman" and working for their customers directly -- which even without noncompetes would have created some dodgy situations.
I've actually seen multiple major consulting companies (often international ones or subsidiaries of international ones) that explicitly required a noncompete so vague that it would have practically prevented me from working for any company in the industry while also working for them -- because there would have been just no easy way for me to tell whether I was accidentally working for one of their customers or not. I never signed those but considering that certain companies like to just put into contracts whatever they would love to be able to do without any concern for validity or enforceability, I wonder what the legal situation around those would have looked like.
Generally noncompetes are fairly widespread to varying extents. The default seems to be that you can't compete with your employer while you are employed (whether it's by freelancing on the side, poaching their customers or directly working for another competitor) though in practice employers will generally grant you permission to have a side-job as long as there's no conflict of interest and it doesn't impact your job performance.
However noncompetes terminate once the employment ends. The only way to extend the duration of the noncompete is by having the contract also reimburse you for the duration of that extended noncompete. Both sides can agree to lift that extension but if it's in the contract, the employer will likely have to pay for a certain amount of time whether they want to enforce the noncompete or not.
So in other words, while there may be scenarios where noncompetes impact your ability to find another job while still employed, the second your employment terminates, you're either free or continually being paid an appropriate sum of money.
As a freelancer I had clients that insisted on some form of noncompete, but these were generally only protecting them from me "skipping the middleman" and working for their customers directly -- which even without noncompetes would have created some dodgy situations.
I've actually seen multiple major consulting companies (often international ones or subsidiaries of international ones) that explicitly required a noncompete so vague that it would have practically prevented me from working for any company in the industry while also working for them -- because there would have been just no easy way for me to tell whether I was accidentally working for one of their customers or not. I never signed those but considering that certain companies like to just put into contracts whatever they would love to be able to do without any concern for validity or enforceability, I wonder what the legal situation around those would have looked like.