Well here is someone "in the industry", who completely agrees with the need for coding literacy. I can program, but I'm not a "programmer" by any means, and it's clear to see in whatever client I work with (I'm a Big 4 Management Consultant, sorry), coding skills are becoming increasingly relevant. Macro skills are the tip of the iceberg, some industries such as investment banking and engineering practically require programming skills to find a job, as the previous poster stated. Sure they can write the requirements for an application, but mostly these are not applications, these are ad-hoc, on the fly, limited use models that need to be made and altered in time with market fluctuations or environmental conditions - far quicker than monolithic IT departments can respond (even with agile work teams).

I don't really care which way you phrase it, whether you see the programming as incidental or the job function as incidental is just a matter of perspective. The fact is, programming (or at least "soft" programming skills such as VB and SQL) are becoming increasingly essential for many of the top tier jobs in today's economy. Don't want to learn programming? No problem - I'll find a few million Indians who do.