I think there's a distinction between accruing and applying generic skills in a particular discipline and using intellectual property from one employer to benefit another. If you have agreed to protect the trade secrets of your (former) employer, you need to exercise your professional judgement to draw the line between contributions that stem from your experience in the field and those that are informed by work that you or others did for hire at your former employer.
Within that framework, plenty of things are clearly out of bounds, like copied source code. I would argue that re-implementing chunks of code that you know to be economically valuable and unique to your former employer from memory is just as problematic.
Now, by out of bounds, I mean breach of a civil contract. I don't see the criminal aspect.
Basically, there's no need to erase your memory, you just need to distinguish exchanging your time for money from exchanging your former employer's IP for money.
I've been working for a number of years on a product of similar nature.
If I switched companies to make a new system from scratch, it would take me a non-trivial amount of time to replicate a full system, and I probably wouldn't do it the same way. Even if I did it the same way, it would be hard work. During years of work one encounters many little problems, glitches, and even random ideas that don't come to mind so easily.
Obviously the previous experience helps a lot but having your old code basically bootstraps you. And the reason that coders in this sector are paid well, is that obviously the expertise is worth more than the code itself looking into the future. But still, if you do something really stupid like giving them an excuse to lock you up when you're going to a competitor, then you're screwed. I'm pretty sure Aleynikov would agree with me that he fucked up massively by taking his code home. If not, then he'd be out of touch with reality. The very thought of trying to do what he did makes me anxious. Big corporations are powerful and can fuck your life up.
Within that framework, plenty of things are clearly out of bounds, like copied source code. I would argue that re-implementing chunks of code that you know to be economically valuable and unique to your former employer from memory is just as problematic.
Now, by out of bounds, I mean breach of a civil contract. I don't see the criminal aspect.
Basically, there's no need to erase your memory, you just need to distinguish exchanging your time for money from exchanging your former employer's IP for money.