There's a difference between writing something that compiles and being able to write code properly.
The "throw enough cheap coders" at the problem will work really well, until it doesn't, and at that point you have nothing but an expensive mess that needs to be rebuilt from the ground up.
If you don't have a good foundation, you're screwing the project in the long run, and this is the result of every offshoring programming project I've witnessed.
So more than your average CS engineering grad?
>>Imagine a student who never wrote a line of code in his entire life suddenly has become a developer.
B.S.
Everyone writes code these days. Most electronics people study at-least 3 - 4 programming languages. In fact things like C, 8085, 8086 and a PIC.