RE: "Prior Inventions" on employment contract

Good points Booth, and it wasn't clear from the initial post, but is
this job for a software house or just a business that uses computers ?

At my previous employer, a manufacturing company, we were taken over by
another company and they tried that with all the R&D folks, scientists,
etc. and then they came looking at I.T. While they got riped up one side
and down the other by the previous folks mentioned, we (I.T.) just
ignored the things and it was MONTHS before we actually signed them. We
were not a software house so I just figured they could not "claim my
brain" and what they were trying to prevent, they were and had been
benefiting from, from my employment at the company I had worked before I
came there - that is what we do is all about. If I had developed a
better way of coding (and this was back in the S/38 and then early
AS/400 days), i.e. modular programming say for an update routine, that
is something I would reuse somewhere else and has NO impact on that
company. We had no real concern because it was just ideas as far as we
were concerned and the company was not selling that as a product, etc.
We all felt we were different than the scientists who WERE developing
stuff the company was selling.

Chuck