[Dewie]

> It is in pretty much every tech company's employment contract in the US regardless of size.

If you couple that with an expectation in certain programming circles that you should do programming as a hobby as well as a job, you've got the nice effect of working 40 hours a week for your employer, + all the hours that you spend on programming in your free time for your employer, as in 'they'll cash in if it is succesful'. So like a little speculative, cost free investment for the company.

The only way that I can reconcile this with the modern off-work github coding is that the programmers don't keep this in the back of their minds, and that whatever big fall outs of this have been relatively isolated.

(obviously I am only talking about side projects that could potentially have some value, not the 'implement pac man in brainfuck' for the pain, I mean for educational purposes, type of projects)