My worst job hunting experience was going through a slimy recruiter and eventually receiving an offer from a company I was initially excited to work at until I

My worst job hunting experience was going through a slimy recruiter and eventually receiving an offer from a company I was initially excited to work at until I read the absolutely bizarre and overbearing contract and tried for two weeks to tell them to just take all the weird, nonsensical stuff out and I would sign and eventually they pulled the offer. iirc one of the clauses stated that I would make myself available to the employer to perform work for them on an as needed basis in the three months after quitting the job but the amount of work over that three months would never exceed 2 weeks in total blah blah blah. Another one was something like agreeing make myself available to participate in legal disputes etc. I asked them about examples of when these clauses had been enforced and what did that look like in practice etc? They remarked the first one was mostly done after hours etc. I just couldn't fathom why the heck any old regular engineer would sign off on a clause like that, but was told that "everyone signs it and we're not changing it". Knowing I had the legal right to get any employment contract reviewed by a lawyer, I did exactly that. Good move indeed. The clauses were bad enough they tripped my BS meter, but the lawyer pointed out further BS in some of the vagueness of the wording. I think one example was the clause stating you had to make yourself available to the employer for work on an as needed basis after leaving the job had a sentence indicating that if you needed to travel you would bear the cost and/or there was something about a rate or amount of money that just was totally unspecified. She also rightly pointed out if you had another full time job you had just signed a contract for, you couldn't execute both contracts without being in violation of at least one of them and if the split with ths whacko employer was not amicable then they could absolutely have you over a barrel. I got my lawyer to tell them to remove those things, and that's when they pulled the offer. It was a bit of a shock and quite upsetting to me at the time. During that phone conversation with the recruiter where he told me they were pulling the offer he revealed that a previous employee had stolen the source code and tried to set up a competing product and wound up in a legal dispute with the company, so the fact that I was "already getting lawyers involved" was a "red flag" to them. If you're paying careful attention you'll notice the absolutely circular logic of that absurd reasoning!!!! Anyway that at least explained sme of the weird, nonsensical, heavily defensive clauses, though not all of it. Anyway I dodged an absolute bullet on that one.