It’s also not realistic because many businesses would prefer you not give back because it’s like giving away IP. It stays in house. You would be breaking your employment contract if you do so (speaking for the US)
You need to get permission from your employer obviously but I think most are fine with that these days.
I'm not talking about open sourcing something your company has made from scratch and is their core product but just contributing (usually small) imporovements made to some open source used so the "giving away IP argument doesn't really hold water".
In my experience that's an easy sell to the company on purely practical / selfish terms ("we can keep it in house and have to spend time reapplying our changes to each new upstream version that comes out or we can submit it upstream and have easier updates in the future").
Look at all the companies contributing to the Linux kernel in each release, most of them do it for precisiely this reason.
I am reacting to the latter as well. Not sure how many corporate lawyers / attorneys you have dealt with but it’s brutal. And they usually are not technically savvy. Better off keep reapplying
