I agree that they are likely following the advice of 3rd party lawyers, but that absolutely does not let them off the hook. Legal documents just aren't that hard to understand, if the organization doesn't bother reading them or takes a maximalist approach that is absolutely their choice.
You shouldn't need to back and forth and have leverage to get a reasonable contract, the "standard contract" should be balanced. If they argue that it's the lawyers doing it and that oh no of course they would never use total ownership is a good starting point -- regardless of whether there's competition with their business or whether it's done on the clock -- they are going to keep using lawyers as an excuse to screw you over.
Yeah, companies need protection from some things but employees do too. It shouldn't take a state law to get employment contracts to be appropriate instead of simply "arguably legal".
Yeah the fact that this "dice roll" arbitrary precedent from old boilerplate and 3rd partly lawyers is so hard to displace indicates the weak position of labor in the labor market.
Sure, you can be a bit conspiratorial and say that this works out in the employers favor, helps suppress side projects that might become profitable, etc. etc. but I prefer the simple-stupid reading that the weaker part has trouble pushing back on inertia and the stronger party alike.
Keep in mind that this labour that's considered utself shortage, overpayed and somewhat 'elite'. Most devs thing standard issues of labour don't apply to them. Yet we can barely get a useless clause changed in a contract
Honestly my main hope is that junior devs of ten years ago have had to put up with this long enough that they're senior enough now to stick up for the direct reports they perhaps have now.
Of course, it's far more common to develop the attitude that if it was "standard" when they were junior and they turned out alright then surely it's fine. And for 99% of them it will have turned out fine.
I've repeatedly heard from older engineers that you shouldn't worry too much about what the contract says because [you're going to get it perfect so it won't come up, the customer in question would never, it's just standard language so you can ignore it, if you try to push back you just won't get the work] and while I understand the desire to ignore the problem and instead do the fun engineering this just seems ridiculous to me.
What I takeaway from this is that engineers, like any reasonable human, aren't interested in legal documents and have been trained over decades by companies to not care how abusive their contracts are, because they personally haven't been bitten.
"Sure, you hear about it from time to time but it'd never happen to me," is an unfortunate attitude for the only people senior enough to do anything about it. I wish I saw a better way out but it's hard not to empathize with someone who has been doing engineering for 40 years and has had to sign scores of employment agreements and just wants to build some stuff before they retire.
In general, The training of engineers profoundly lacks in instilling skepticism. Whatever snark / cynicism is popular in places like this has nothing to do with our formal training (for those of us that were formal trained).
This example is rightly absurd because if someone told me "don't worry about that code that will segfault, it's never actually called", I would naturally say "WTF this is unacceptable complacency". And yet the argument in both situations is damn near identical!
I think this no good at all, and when the humanities people bring up STEM credulousness, I am quite sympathetic.
You shouldn't need to back and forth and have leverage to get a reasonable contract, the "standard contract" should be balanced. If they argue that it's the lawyers doing it and that oh no of course they would never use total ownership is a good starting point -- regardless of whether there's competition with their business or whether it's done on the clock -- they are going to keep using lawyers as an excuse to screw you over.
Yeah, companies need protection from some things but employees do too. It shouldn't take a state law to get employment contracts to be appropriate instead of simply "arguably legal".