Apparently, one day, he threatened to quit for another offer. He was placated with some trivial pay increase and promotion to lead engineer (essentially leap-frogging the other seniors in the office in title - but not in pay).
Except no announcement was made; I had no idea he'd been promoted. One day he walks into my office and starts telling me I need to redesign some module using XYZ Design pattern.
"Nope, don't think so - that would be a pointless and unnecessary complication and we have a release on Friday."
"No, you need to do it. I already talked to the Engineering Manager."
I can't remember exactly what I said next, but it wasn't very nice.*
Then I'm getting called into the Engineering Manager's office: "Can you just do the thing he asked you to do, please? I know, I know... we kinda have to humor him on this."
* - of course I remember what I said, and it definitely wasn't nice.