> It's perfectly fine for a company to demand that if they hand over their proprietary know-how to you, know-how that has cost them years to acquire, you won't

> It's perfectly fine for a company to demand that if they hand over their proprietary know-how to you, know-how that has cost them years to acquire, you won't take it to the competitor across the street. This never happens. For software developers, most "proprietary know-how" is awful in-house inner platforms that work like shit but you're forced to use it because otherwise some senior vice president would have to admit he made a bad decision 9 years ago. The companies who try hardest to protect their trade secrets are exactly those companies with the dumbest secrets. There's absolutely no risk to the company that their employees will take their competitive advantage to some competitor "across the street". What actually happens is that the company uses this as a prison fence to keep their employees from being able to leave when they treat them like shit. > If a company is paying you, they own what you create on company time and company equipment You're misrepresenting what those clauses say. Those clauses actually say "literally anything you ever do from the time of signing this document until the time you quit, we own, if we want it." If you draw an idea for a new fusion reactor on the back of a napkin late one night in a bar, your company now owns all rights to that design, and you are never allowed to do anything with it, ever. Yes, that's what they say. Yes, they're bullshit. That's why everyone hates them.