One way to rephrase this is... why commit to a one-time decision when you might be able to run away and never look back? -- reinvent oneself in a new land.
Few legal constructs cannot be run from. Few legal arrangements cannot be undone. For those that cannot... run!
... just considering this possibility is often enough to give you the strength to keep fighting through whatever current situation or struggle you find yourself in.
Welcome to the future of CS. As technical fields cross into the phase of commonly understood knowledge, the ability to exploit imbalances rises. Opportunity exists everywhere, but we as insiders with our vast technical knowledge are distracted by our awe of capability. We fail to exploit the low hanging fruit that a capitalist might immediately sense. We would rather pursue deeper knowledge within our domain to be masters of our craft.
People selling cell phone mods don't usually know anything about electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, or manufacturing; yet they somehow can pull millions of dollars of profits out of plastic cases and LED mods simply by dangling a few slices of pizza in front of a hungry college student.
Point is, exploitation is everywhere -- don't be exploited, and computer science is at the stage where it's simple enough to follow some rules and slap a few APIs together to build a decent mash-up that's never existed before... that a fraction of people are willing to pay for, and "make bank bro".
I hate it. It's not just you feeling this frustration. Just see the writing on the wall, and know that app dev / pipelining of data feeds is going to be as "easy" as programming a VCR in the 90's.
Why is this a bad thing? Business people are good at selling things and making money. This is what they do. If you are envious of their skills, learn how to do it yourself. Get a low level sales job on commission and see what it's like. I doubt it is as easy as you might think.
having read through a good majority of the peanut gallery, i'm compelled to say that your contract is your duty.
having said that, ... get a good lawyer. the original contract might be vague enough that the lawyer has had experience with similarly worded crap in the past.
any company that tries to steal your personal development for the entire time you're employed is not some company that you want to work with. a good fight is just a good american spirit. fight that crap that junk corporate throws at you.
tl;dr - fuck 'em. let the lawyers fight it out, but get a good lawyer. dollar-for-dollar, they're worth it. no matter, your education is worth the lawyer dollars regardless.
damn near everybody is intrigued by that guy that's got one foot out the door.
say you're a double-agent. the only thing that matters is if you're working against the common good. if you're totally on another level, you really have nothing to worry about.
the contracts you signed when you were new and stupid are an entirely different beast. get a good lawyer; you should be fine 9 times out of 10 as long as you're not violating a typical no-compete clause... or that no-compete clause over-steps its boundaries.
12 years at one company. work was interesting. then we took on a project that just wouldn't quit. the work was remote and exotic. then it was repetitive and mindless. then it was copying data. now i sit waiting for the day to be over because, i don't want to review the repetitive data that was recorded. 10 TB ... of crap.
Funny how that was one of the first few things I had to teach myself, as distributed systems was something that only the biggest businesses had when I started school, and so, the curriculum didn't exist yet.
Hadoop is not exactly the best example of distributed, but it does contain all the core components. If you want a highly efficient, distributed system, then I suggest one tries to write their own. This ground is still being tested.
Sockets and asyncrony are tricky things, and I'm sure there exist better ways of achieving distributed computing.
The various forms of distributed systems is something that many people don't fully grasp. It's rather easy to build your own #1 or #3 (hadoop). Facebook has done an alright job at #4. Parallel reductions on distributed systems... I'm thinking million factor by billion-row matricies. That is something that we have yet to explore. Sure, we've done thousand-factor by billion row no problem. That's essentially a map-reduce. But doing the matrix reductions on 1e6 by 1e9+ is not something typically done. ... at all. One would need to find alternate ways of representing those 1e6 features as separate matrices... perhaps some form of Bernoulli/Bayes combination and increase the number of operations by 1000-fold.
// Forgive me for the rant. This is something I do like to think of in my spare time. You're right in that self-taught's don't have this skill. My value-add is that a lot of school-educated don't possess this skill either.
Few legal constructs cannot be run from. Few legal arrangements cannot be undone. For those that cannot... run!
... just considering this possibility is often enough to give you the strength to keep fighting through whatever current situation or struggle you find yourself in.