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Anything done on the employee's own time, using their own equipment, and not relying on IP owned by the company is owned by the employee, and non-competes do not apply. There's a standard form outlining this attached to every CA employment agreement.

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You missed the part where you can't work on something that is in the same field.

Has this actually held up? My understanding is that what specific and specialized areas of work on off-time is considered company IP have to be enumerated, and must depend upon availability of unusual proprietary information.

I haven't found any cases in my (admittedly brief) search that actually rule on this, but there's a pretty clear pattern in CA jurisprudence that suggests that a broad application of "related work" is unlikely to be looked upon positively. To me, it's pretty clear that use of trade secrets would be about the only thing that courts are _likely_ to agree upon as out of bounds for personal work.

From the sounds of it, they are going after him for non-compete, but breach of contract.

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