The article doesn't mention the author's programming experience before university.
The author also has a CS degree from Stanford, interned at Facebook and Google, and is currently a software engineer at Pinterest. Even if your earlier assertion about lack of programming experience is true, it's obvious the author isn't incapable of writing software. Did you even read the article before commenting?
"At Stanford, I took two introductory computer science classes. I soon became convinced that I was much too behind my male classmates to ever catch up."
I did not even know it was possible to take TWO introductory courses, but what do I know, I did not go to Stanford. Everyone that knew how to code before university breezed through the intro course. This was still true when I was a TA for undergraduate courses during grad school.
I have worked with plenty of CS graduates that cannot code during my decades in the field.
Well I don't know the guts of Stanford's CS program either, but the term 'introductory computer science class', particularly pluralized, could easily be a course of the form 'Introduction to X' where X is some broad CS speciality, not necessarily a programming one. It could be Introduction to HCI, Artificial Intelligence, Complexity Theory, whatever...
And of course, if she had no programming ability beforehand, the fact she overcame your hypothetical hurdle to be able to put 'Software Engineer of <famous silicon valley company>' on her resume suggests she's not in the class of programming-incapables to be completely written off.
The author also has a CS degree from Stanford, interned at Facebook and Google, and is currently a software engineer at Pinterest. Even if your earlier assertion about lack of programming experience is true, it's obvious the author isn't incapable of writing software. Did you even read the article before commenting?