Out of curiosity, I checked our policy. The people who can get monetary awards at my company are:

- active employees, and

- retired employees who retire with eligibility for retiree health benefits (my understanding is that this is, approximately, people who worked for the company for 20 years or more), if they provide requested assistance to the company to get the patent issued after their retirement.

So at my company, if you just left without having been here for a long time, they wouldn't give you the money after you left. (This is what I thought, and good to know in my case since I have a few patents in the pipeline myself...)

Furthermore, there is no mention that "this is different in California". We employ people all over the country including in California, and a lot of our policies do call out California specifically because it does have different laws, so I suspect there's nothing special about California here. (I am not a lawyer.)