Reading the article raised tangential questions for me: How comfortable is it for someone who's not a programmer by temperament or interest to get a computer science degree in college? Or, alternately, what percentage of computer science grads simply aren't programmers? I've never really thought about this but now I'm wondering!
I went to a good school for computing science and I know I graduated with a few people who couldn't program. They had no intention of programming in their career which is good because in 4th year they were producing awful spaghetti code.
To pass any decent CS course you need to at least be able to program, but outside of maybe a few group projects the programs that you write won't be very large so you don't have to be an expert in TDD, version control or any frameworks.
In the UK at least once you get into the 2nd/3rd year of the degree you get to select a larger number of the modules that you study. So it's possible to choose modules with lower programming content which might be focused on theory or on business type subjects.
Most universities here offer a sister degree to CS which is focused on business computing/project management and has substantially less programming.
Having taught university students in "computing studies", I'd venture to guess that it isn't that big of a deal for them to go through the motions of the course and eek out a pass by acing the essay questions. I don't have any statistics, but I'd guess about half of them would have had a hard time putting two lines of code together. Back then (late nineties), it was the ideal major for people who didn't know what to major in. Enrollment in the UK is down since then because the generation that grew up equating computer science with using microsoft office (thanks to Bill Gates lobbying Tony Blair) has come of age, and the educational authorities are trying desperately to repair the curriculum. The last time I applied for a teaching job (two or three years ago) the curriculum I was expected to teach looked like it could have been written in the eighties. The job went to someone with more teaching experience than me.
Edit: I met a former student on the London Underground some years later who wasn't much good at anything in school besides cracking onto his female colleagues, but got serious after that and ended up scoring a decent programming job in finance. Academic performance might not be such a good predictor of later success.
I think it's a small percentage but there are a few for sure. In my last position, I worked with a few comp-sci grads who were "not programmers" (their words) and had really no interest in programming. They just wanted to play with technology and kind of strategize around it.
