Does this person think that programming will suddenly be a breeze if it is done as a hobby rather then as a job? Even if you are programming in your own free time you will still have to deal with the perversions of internet exploder and other fatally flawed programming platforms. At least if you are doing it as a job you are getting paid for it!
I think what happened to OP is that he's getting tossed the shit work and nothing interesting, so he's doing someone else's IE support.
If you're building your own web app, you decide if, and when, to support IE. If it's bringing in $10k/month and you can double that, it's worth the hours of unpleasantness to get the additional money. If it's something you're doing for fun that isn't going to make money, you don't do the IE hacks. But there's no point in doing someone else's IE support, unless you can get a promotion or a bonus out of it.
The problem is that while he sucks at politics (that's why he's doing someone else's shit work) he doesn't know he sucks-- the first of four stages, unknowing incompetence-- so he thinks that the industry is just chock-full of shit work, because that's all he's able to get (and he hasn't figured out that you don't really "get assigned" the best work; you just do it). He needs to learn how to fight for himself; that's his real problem. Otherwise, he'll end up pulling a Walter White over-correction when it's decades too late.
