Speaking only for myself, I "learned to code" six years before I got to college to study CS. CS taught me a bunch about what I was doing right and what I was doing wrong. My first paid programming job, as a senior/first-year master student taught me what all that meant when applied to what a business operation needs from its coders.

Learning to code, means being able to write a o(n^2) sort, not necessarily being able to tell why that algorithm is bad, or what O(n^2) means.