I kind of fired off my initial comment and should have maybe thought it through a little more, non competes are one of many reasons holding this region back. Our very risk averse investment culture is probably the biggest one actually (example: http://www.crainscleveland.com/article/20160204/NEWS/1602099...).
And of course as you said, our brutal, brutal winters.
I was more agreeing with knoepfle's comment in rolling my eyes every time one of these articles pops up and gets shared all over my twitter, linkedin and facebook feeds. There's many reasons a lot of our talent flees the west coast or Chicago or NYC, and we'd rather read these fluff pieces instead of acknowledging and trying to fix the issues that would keep them here.
My admittedly anecdotal evidence is I know very talented people that have left the region to avoid litigation from their former employers and start their own ventures or advance their careers. Perhaps you have a lawyer that can compete with a corporate legal team, most of us do not.
Cleveland, Ohioan here. Just about every tech company requires, and will enforce to the fullest extent, non-competes. We're no where close to being the next silicon valley.
We outsource our HR/recruiting to a few third parties in a small market (Cleveland, OH, USA), there's just no way I'd trust this. Word gets out fast enough as it is here, among other things that happen behind closed doors that I wish I could bring up publicly :(
Textpattern was the first CMS that I "got" as a front end guy- after wrangling crap like PHPNuke and FusionPHP or whatever it was a breath of fresh air. Glad to see it's still kicking