Maybe he’s recognized something brilliant. Management doesn’t know that the program he wrote was just a reimplementation of the Unix “cut” and “paste” commands, so he might as well get rewarded for their ignorance.

And to be fair, if folks didn’t get paid for reinventing basic Unix utilities with extra steps, the economy would probably collapse.

Clearly I'm the dumbass in this story, as we're all paid by the hour...

Clearly! He’s found a magic portal to the good old days when the fruit was all low hanging, and you keep showing up with a ladder.