I suspect this is driven less by an overpossessive engineering management team than a legal team. I'd love to know more about what general counsel is afraid of since I know a lot of people under the same restriction and it meshes with the story Spoolsky tells[1] on side projects:
> Because they might try to take an investment, and the investor would say, “prove to me that you’re not going to get sued by some disgruntled ex-employee who claims to have invented the things that you’re selling.” The company wants to be able to pull out a list of all current and past employees, and show a contract from every single one of them assigning inventions to the company.
