> Yes, the better ones have a clause that restricts the claim to competitive work, but not all do.

Yeah, this is my whole point. The rest of your comment, I agree with. In practice you're unlikely to have an issue for something orthogonal and especially something financially worthless.

But you might. There are a lot of people out there that have predatory attitudes towards IP, especially among C-level or would-be-C-level.

And companies that restrict to competing IP do exist.

It’s certainly shifted toward restricting the scope to competing IP, but that’s only in the last 15 years or so. Prior to that it was definitely more all encompassing. But yea, companies are becoming more enlightened as key employees push back and the companies figure out that they don’t really want your orthogonal ideas anyway. But back in the day, particularly when many employees might only work for a maximum of three to five companies anyway, it was extremely common to have “we own everything you create” clauses.