No one will ever give you a yes or no answer. Never. It's like raising VC, or invading Russia. They will just put everything off until tomorrow. Forever.
I worked at That Place In The Valley that is not in Cupertino or Menlo Park. I tried to get "I own the IP" authorization for some side project that didn't matter to the business. I had a meeting every two weeks or so for a year and a half and nothing ever happened.
But now they know about it, and could make a claim if it blew up. So that's over.
That hasn't been my experience (albeit with much smaller companies). For one thing, if you have correspondence showing that you've made a good faith effort to get an answer, it is going to tilt the playing field in your favor in a dispute.
But as going to court isn't what you want, this does lead in to something of a ProTip (though IANAP, TINPA): In general, when hashing out a contract, it can pay off to ask for various requirements imposed on you (in this case, it would be disclosure "within 30 days") to be mirrored by similar requirements on the employer.
I didn't plow ahead, I stopped once I thought it might have potential. I really only tried for the few months, after that they kept asking me permission to close the request and I kept telling them no. (I was pretty pissed).
I'm not quite sure this is good general advice. It may work for the top 0.01% of talent in Silicon Valley who can quit their job and find another one right away, but that's not the case for the vast majority of tech folks. My company has an extremely hostile stance towards side projects, which is pretty crappy and demoralizing, but there's no way in hell I'm going to quit over it, particularly if I have nothing else lined up. Best to just put side projects on "pause" if you're working in a place you think would try to grab it.
As I said elsewhere on the thread: the worst, most heartbreaking problems a startup can have are the kind that only become apparent after the company is successful. You screw up vesting or grants somehow. You mess up liability in a contract, or don't get any legal review at all. In almost every case, you're fine either way...
... except in that one, 1% case, where your omission almost entirely counterfeits your success, negating the work you put in only after you've navigated the rest of the whitewater rapids of getting traction for a new company.
If you're just doing side projects for the hell of it, with no intention of ever starting something commercial with it, I'm almost right there with you, and I think the side project concern is overblown.
But if there's even a chance that you're going to commercialize something, you need to be aware that the gravity of your legal fuckups will almost never be apparent until after you're worth caring about, and in most cases --- especially for your first company --- the work and stress you have to put in to reach the point of being "worth caring about" is grueling.
If it helps my case at all (it wouldn't for me, since I'm an inveterate bootstrapper): not taking this side-project stuff seriously is going to seriously complicate both fundraising and later M&A stuff, where the warrants and reps process is going to go through this IP stuff in agonizing detail.
Just fill out the stupid invention disclosure form thingy your company almost certainly has, and quit if they give you any shit about it. It's too good a job market to take this risk in.