It completely depends on what area you're going into. Software engineering, systems, and AI students obviously need significant coding experience. HCI and theory (ie math), not as much.
Right, but what I wanted to highlight - a person might be able to code quick sort algorithm or breadth first search, but unable to get paid doing real world coding - when it is the client or employer who needs to be satisfied.
So basically when you have a choice of being unemployed vs doing PhD and getting some studentship, you obviously prefer the latter path.
And I believe there are quite many people who can "code" but unable to get paid.
If you can "code" so poorly that you're unable to get paid, I can't imagine how you'd get even close to getting into a PhD program, even if your specialization is math of finite state automata or human interface guidelines.
Coding (or being DBA or analyst, depending on your area) to the level of getting an okay salary is quite trivial compared to that - from the PhD students I've seen the 'most unemployable' ones would be so not because of their ability to code but because of social/mental issues.
Theory cs could care less about coding abilities. It's never a bad thing to know how to code, but I can go though the entire PhD program without coding a single line of code. (Well not really, one of the professors in my PhD program committee recommended me to do one systems course. other than that, I just prove theorems. )
Yes, we've got a bunch of people like that in our PhD program as well - but 100% of them, despite not writing a single line of code for years, could still easily get a paying job in industry and be mostly okay (though less happy) there.
If you can prove theorems, then you can also code CRUD websites by following a tutorial, and get paid for that.
If you can't write code if your life depended on it but can write papers on human interface or methodology issues, then you can get a job as a system analyst in any large software development company and keep not writing code there.
