I actually regard the fact that someone could say this as a great example of why computer science education is broken.
The reality is that there's a tremendous amount of REALLY BAD code out there, written by C.S. Majors and non-C.S. Majors alike. I'm minded of one case where a self-taught perl programmer in a company I worked for absolutely could not figure out why his code to convert a few megabytes of data was taking days to run. Turned out he was appending to a string in order to add a few bytes to it, and every time he did it perl was copying the string to a new location. Simply by "pre-allocating" the string we cut the run time down to a couple of hours.
This would have been obvious to him if he'd ever coded in C, or taken a data structures class. But he hadn't.
Things like data structures, algorithms, and most importantly security are hard. They can't be taught in a trade school, because people in trade schools lack the necessary background. In the case above, I tried to explain to the guy the whole concept of "big O", and quickly discovered that he didn't know what a factorial was, nor a logarithm, and was a bit sketchy on the concept of geometric expansion.
Please don't dump more half-trained programmers on us. We don't need them, and those of us who do understand information theory (with or without degrees) will spend way too much time fixing their errors. I'm not saying everyone needs to be a CS major (my B.S. is in Philosophy, my masters is in Theology, and my Ph.D. is in New Testament.) I AM saying that there should be a requirement to learn some basic skill before you're allowed to write code for a living.
