Revert the modification from commit 8ae67f6a54 ; it appears that the test of required field is done before the computation of the related field and that leads to a Validation Error.
As the field employee_id is already required and the user_id is related to this field, the attribute required is redundant and unecessary.
The commit 3269ad8f get back the behaviour of 7.0 (which changed in
october 2014) that when a field is overrided via the old api, attributes
of a previous definition of the field are lost.
This fix corrects the case when this behaviour might have had an effect
so specified attributes overrided don't get lost.
related to opw-639712