Probably should have paid him triple the salary to be the best engineer you ever worked with then.
I used to be the type to make loyalty to my great exalted employer first and foremost, sacrificing chunks of my personal life beyond what my salary required. Then I wised up and now view it as how much I can extract as quickly as possible. Coincidentally, the quality of my work shot up when I viewed myself as mostly a mercenary, consistent raises, consistently good reviews even though I care less and less. So I see where he is coming from and I wish more people thought like him.
In a lot of ways the "overemployment" thing comes down to treating full-time jobs like agency clients. Which I'm all for in theory and I'm a lot happier when I'm working with clients instead of employers. But I can't personally handle the dishonesty required.
People work for satisfaction as well as money. You even give your own examples of a non-financial motivation before you got "wise". Only caring about money sounds like hell to me. Look at everyone that chooses a calling or career that doesn't pay well like teaching or much of our health system. Please don't assume they are stupid people making bad decisions - they often know exactly what they are doing (e.g. my extremely smart teacher friends) and part of their gross income is the non-financial payoffs of the job.
Personally I think society depends strongly on people chasing satisfaction from their jobs, and sectors which only chase the money have a rather sick ambiance (although perhaps necessary sectors?). Every good tradie is proud of their work.
There are a lot of taker/user jobs and bosses - perhaps avoiding those is the trick if you want satisfaction.
I've been in jobs with nothing to do. It sucks.
Work is an important component of a happy life. If I ever get tired of software maybe I'll go garden or something.
“We gave him the max 5% raise” doesn’t come close to cutting it.