Coding is anything but cheap. You speak like someone who has completely forgotten how difficult it was to learn everything you now know by heart.
It doesn't take a 4 year education to learn how to use loops, functions, and basic data structures. Most of you could probably code by the end of your fresan year of college. Many probably learned at least some coding before college.
I've learned plenty since those days. I can code much faster now than I used to - in the same way an accountant is probably faster at mental math than they once were. But an accountant's value isn't in how fast they can crunch numbers. In the same way, a software engineer's value isn't in how fast they can code.
Many employers' understanding of programming is stuck in the era of the 1970s. At that time, this was indeed what programming was about. Since that time, programming has evolved a lot to encompass much more complicated concepts.
Well said.