i've seen some pretty shitty grad students but i don't really blame the grad school. a lot of non-cs undergrads go into cs grad programs with barely any programming experience. in my experience, the grad programs don't teach them the fundamentals (assuming they know them) but instead teach very specific niche areas. They end up never learning basic programming fundamentals.
My sister is a graduate student in Neuropsychology. As part of her graduate program, she was required to take a programming class; because programming is an important tool that she needs to be able to use to do her research.
Simmilarly, most research in CS will involve using programming as a tool, even if it is not the final product. The problem is that in CS, no one thinks to require the graduate students to take basic programming classes.
> As part of her graduate program, she was required to take a programming class; because programming is an important tool that she needs to be able to use to do her research.
But for students focusing in complexity, they may not need to program at all, so naturally it makes sense there would not be much emphasis on programming.