[itamarst]

After you've gotten a lawyer to look at your current agreement, you may find it's enforceable and actually prevents you from building a side project.

If that's the case, you do have the option of finding a new job. Some companies have more lenient IP agreements. And if you're a desirable enough candidate and it's a small company, you can negotiate a custom IP contract.

I've done that twice!

If you negotiate an IP contract and you get back "but our lawyer says the contract is cool", what you do is have your lawyer propose amendments. Often it's not so much the content of the changes that gets pushback, just the effort and cost of the process. So if you pay your lawyer to do the legal work it can make it a lot easier.

(I hired Rex Baker - http://www.rexbaker.com/ - he's great.)

More broadly, negotiation is a key career skill, whether or not you want to be starting your own business. E.g. you can also negotiate a shorter workweek so you have more time for your side business.

I go into this a bit more in an email course I wrote on getting to a sane workweek (https://codewithoutrules.com/saneworkweek/), a very abbreviated version of a book I'm working on.