It sounds to me like he has a lot of room to grow in his day job, if he wants to be a software developer. If he doesn't want to be a software developer, then s

It sounds to me like he has a lot of room to grow in his day job, if he wants to be a software developer. If he doesn't want to be a software developer, then sure, he can duck the issues of maintenance, legacy code, low-level code, and all that. He can hobby-code his own projects and avoid other people's code. That means finding another career, though. If he wants to revive his programming career, he needs to face up to his weaknesses, which is exactly what his current job is pushing him to do, if only he'll commit to it.