> I say don't change much because a 2-3% raise once in a
> while is nice, but it's nothing in comparison to the
> thousands/millions extra it will make the company, while the
> only result for me is that I get to keep my job and do more
> of that.
Have you considered moving into sales? With your technical background as an engineer, you can certainly forage into sales with the right mentorship.
Sales is about the only type of 'job' that you will feel a proportionate reward to the effort you put in, meaning, you get more if you sell more (e.g. work longer/harder), whereas there's no financial incentive to work longer if you are salaried.
Of course, with sales you pay a different price - time-wise. You may have to be on the road a lot and work longer hours. But many people who are now considered very well off got that way through sales (e.g. John Doerr, who was one of Intel's greatest sales people).
Another way, and this is a tall order, is to find something your company (or the company's customer rather) needs, and try to get something started/prototyped before it becomes an actual project, then pitch that to management/sales/marketing. This way, you create value that was going to be created anyway on the company's dime, but you do this on your own time and hopefully in time for the company to adopt it and transition into your product idea. I know at least a few projects like this where I work, it's just that I value family time above extra cash that isn't really going to make a massive difference to my lifestyle.
I'm talking about software here mostly, as the barrier of entry to creating a software prototype of something is usually lower than creating a hardware prototype of something, depending on application of course.
Notice however, even if you do create something that's of value while working for someone else - you still end up having to 'sell' it to stakeholders within the company who can further give you a budget to polish it... or worst case, you may have to kill it if they don't like it, or don't approve of your methods- mostly because anytime you code something that involves using the company's source code as a base, they get to claim ownership of the IP (software). You read your employment contract, right?
This way, by putting above and beyond your 40 hr/week, you can most assuredly extract promotions and/or additional equity, without taking on the massive stress or risk of venturing out on your own. If you find it too time consuming to code on your own time, there's always options to hire foreign talent from countries with a lower standard of living to help you with coding - though that has its risks too, it's most definitely a viable avenue. I've done that for people who needed me to build simple websites for a lot cheaper than if I had done the website myself as a US-based engineer and usually marked up their rate by 20% or so. I've seen outfits mark up 100% or more... it all depends on what's acceptable to the engineer you're hiring, your customer and ultimately your take.
As you hopefully intuited, if you want the rewards to be proportionate to your effort instead of salaried, it almost always involves some kind of salesmanship in addition to being an astute coder/engineer/techie.
Yet another way is to becomes a serial start-up-eneur. Continue joining startups until one of them hits it off. This is less risk, but many people have gotten well off this way too.
I'm sure there are other ways, I just can't think of them now :)