I imagine that might not be the wider reality, and perhaps someone here knows if coders/IT are useful somewhere but lacking?
Tetra Society (http://www.tetrasociety.org/) Tetra recruits volunteers to design and fabricate items that overcome barriers faced by people with disabilities, of all ages and across North America. Their main page currently features a project that allowed a 19 year-old guitarist with muscular dystrophy play the guitar again. Anyone that's a "maker" type should visit the Tetra site and look at their complete project database -- some are quite impressive.
SpeakYourMind Foundation (http://speakyourmindfoundation.org) The SpeakYourMind Foundation is a growing team of engineers, clinicians, designers, hackers, and social entrepreneurs dedicated to empowering these individuals to re-connect with the world. Our goal is to turn our prototype technologies into viable, affordable and life-changing solutions for the many people with neurological injury and disease who struggle to communicate.
For some inspiration, check out this blog: http://www.hackingsma.com/ It's by the father of a young boy (~2yo?) that can only move two fingers and his toes. It details how he successfully designed a built a wheelchair his son could use to explore his surroundings. When you stop to think that only a tiny fraction of the kids with needs like this have parents capable of providing this sort of help, the need for volunteers becomes clear very quickly.
Quite different than working on the current hotness in FOSS, but perhaps more rewarding in the long run. Just a thought.
It was a serious WTF of hacked together PHP, gazillions of files with hundreds of lines of similar code and it was hard to figure out what was getting executed and what wasn't.
Needed a serious makeover but that would require a lot of dedication.
I can imagine there are a tonne of such sites out there waiting for a professional to fix. I don't just mean coding but the whole thing - consult, design, coding, change management, SEO, etc.