Per my contract, every creative thought and act I perform while employed belongs to my employer. My contract could be interpreted to mean that even my comments here are owned by my employer. Rather demotivating for genuine side-projects.
My father has worked at IBM for 25 years and they have these kind of contracts, and hes gone as far as to try to get them to release him from any IP responsibilities for his homebrew beer and the labels he designs for the beer, and legal wouldn't clear it.
I asked a question about this a while ago on HN, and even threw in the point that I've charged the MacBook with my side projects on the employer's AC outlet (but never used it at work, nor used their network).
The popular answer: buy another battery (carry two) and explore another job.
My interpretation was that if I did work-for-hire e.g. contract work that I never owned (because it was done for a client), then I could develop a portfolio (while not true side projects) outside of work. An extension to that is to work on projects with diffuse ownership (many people on the team). A further extension is to work on purely pro-bono projects (I do find pro bono projects more creatively fulfilling than the constrained business app-type contracts)
Either the headhunters for mobile app developers either don't understand the side project thing or the companies that are using headhunters don't understand it. A company said 'Yes, you can work on your side project as long as it does not use any of the code that we write here'. Really? They don't seem to understand that any decent programmer is constantly rewriting/refactoring/debugging/refining their personal, homegrown library of code and that there is a fair amount of infrastructure/frameworks that is never written from scratch. So, I think this is why so many BigCos are now turning to training their in-house developers on native mobile stuff.
California is unique in that its laws expressly establish that the employer owns trade secrets created by an employee. (Cal. Labor Code Sec. 2860). However, an employer in California would not own trade secrets created on an employee's own time without the use of employee materials. Although the law does not require a contract, it's a good idea to buttress your position in California by the use of a written agreement.
