I don't understand why they can't just write in the contract that you assign copyright of everything you submit to the company as your work? If you work on you

I don't understand why they can't just write in the contract that you assign copyright of everything you submit to the company as your work? If you work on your own projects outside company time and never commits it to a repository or whatever is used then there should be no problem - and if you do then you better have an agreement in place or it becomes the property of the company. On the other hand if you work on side projects during company time then there shouldn't be any legal trouble for the company by not claiming it as theirs, from the company's perspective you are just goofing off which you could also do by browsing reddit or whatever, it shouldn't really be different. Of course if you are incorporating parts of company code into your side project (or probably looking at company code related to what you are working on) then you have made a derivative work, which would already be covered as copyright infringement - but otherwise it's just a work performance issue. I can't really see these "everything you do belongs to us" clauses as anything but pure greed, but maybe that's because I have grown up in a place where this isn't the norm (and it probably wouldn't be enforceable anyways).