It's important to note that the author of that article said he had a degree in Physics: that's a quantitative discipline, and he very likely had to write code as a part of it. It's very likely he is underestimating the advantages that gave him over an Russian Literature Major (to quote Rands) or even an MIS/CIS major.
If you look at a good undergraduate CS program, you'll note that majority of is going to be general skills relevant to any sort of scientific/engineering work: e.g., there may be at most a single programming course in the entire freshman year. That drove me crazy as an undergrad ("when do I get to code, why am I doing all these proofs with Greek symbols?"), but it taught me to reason and think in a rigorous manner.
Of course professional programming experience also teaches you about things such as debugging, release engineering, configuration management and operations; all of these are crucial but are more about being able to scale and iterate upon a basic product, rather than discovering what the product you're building should be.
If you look at a good undergraduate CS program, you'll note that majority of is going to be general skills relevant to any sort of scientific/engineering work: e.g., there may be at most a single programming course in the entire freshman year. That drove me crazy as an undergrad ("when do I get to code, why am I doing all these proofs with Greek symbols?"), but it taught me to reason and think in a rigorous manner.
Of course professional programming experience also teaches you about things such as debugging, release engineering, configuration management and operations; all of these are crucial but are more about being able to scale and iterate upon a basic product, rather than discovering what the product you're building should be.