Not an odd premise at all. In a startup context, I won't even hire people with a fresh CS degree unless they have something else (personal projects, significant open source effort, real work experience) that convinces me they won't be a liability in a production context.

I'd love to find out who's hiring these people, and how satisfied they are with the results. The two conditions where I can imagine hiring somebody with ~3 months total coding experience are A) when it's mainly a filter for ability to learn, and I expect to invest a lot of time getting them to the level of a production coder and then supervising their work, or B) a situation where output quality doesn't really matter.

I'm hoping all those people end up in situations like A. But there are definitely things that fit B. Back in Bubble 1.0 there were people selling themselves as an "HTML programmer". And there were consulting shops billing total idiots [1] out at $1500/day plus expenses. Your developers don't have to be very good if your sales guys are great and you have at least one solid technical person to put out fires and impress clients.

[1] this kind of idiot: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/02/the-nonprogramming-...