If they worked for a decade and never got a pay rise (other than minimum wage increases), why are they still working there? In an ideal world, you get wage and career progression over time, or move on to a different career otherwise.

I know that he was learning programming on the side so his plan was to work on that, I don't know how that ended up.

However the world we live in is not ideal, and wages are being systematically crushed by capital.