They probably don't, especially if you're in California. Employers love to intimidate with unenforceable terms in contracts.

In CA, the contracts often say something obnoxious to the effect of “we own all your IP except for the IP that the law says we don’t own.”

Unfortunately I live in Texas.

Maybe your wife can make the pull request?

Or your dog

I know it's a tough job market, but that's unacceptable! They won't change, but you shouldn't put up with that.

I'm not done trying to convince them. They're small enough that I think I have a legitimate chance.

Won't help you now OP, but I've always negotiated an IP carve-out for any product(s) that I develop that:

A. Are developed with my own hardware

B. Are developed outside of hours of employment

C. Are not designed to compete with existing company products

Every place I've worked with was amenable to these terms, but I always make sure to get it IN WRITING.

> Every place I've worked with was amenable to these terms

What is the largest company you've successfully gotten to agree to these terms?

It's got to be easiee for a larger company to agree to. What would you be inspired to make that doesn't compete with an existing product if you work at big tech? It feels like they have products in all spaces.

Large companies tend to have very conservative legal departments, and be less supportive of exceptions and more willing to just not hire someone who has requirements outside their perceived norm. The question would be whether the company has ever established an exception path, typically by having a high-level hiring manager insist and running it up the chain.

I knew about this ahead of time. I was kinda going through it mentally at the time and I didn't have the energy to negotiate.

I had that in my contract when I started in the games industry, it was made very clear to me that if I don't like the terms there are 500 other juniors willing to take my spot. Not excusing it, I'm just saying that sometimes you're not in a position to negotiate this if you really want the job(and I really wanted the job at the time, we can argue whether that was the right thing to do or not but the fact remains).

Your cat wrote this pull request? It must be a genius cat!

This is the strategy most of my coworkers take. On principle, I'm just not willing to lie to a project and tell them I have the right to contribute my work under their license.

... don't do it at work?

If your company owns your free time as well, you've fucked up and should talk to HR.

You're correct, I signed a contract that says they own my free time. I didn't exactly want to, and I firmly believe it's wrong. Nevertheless, it's easy to say I fucked up when you don't know my exact situation. This is my first job and there are a lot of other benefits that made it the best option for me personally, even when there were alternatives that had no such clause.

That's fair, I don't know your situation, and my tone was overboard. I don't mean it as a criticism of your actions as much as a warning for others not to do the same without good reason.

Does that mean if you do something semi-illegal or immoral on your freetime they put their name on it? Start doing work on decrypting media (legal if the content is out of copyright, but good luck finding such a thing), porn (again, legal but many won't like it and you can find weird stuff that is even less liked while still legal), or something else that might technically be legal but they don't want their name associated with.

Just create an anonymous new GitHub user, it's like jaywalking. They'll never know.

WTF I've never heard of this. I hope you're getting compensated well.

Unfortunately it's not uncommon here.