You will find many economists that have some programming ability, just like in any other field nowadays: It's too useful an analytical skill. What they will do,

You will find many economists that have some programming ability, just like in any other field nowadays: It's too useful an analytical skill. What they will do, however, is work on, say, a Jupyter notebook, which is as easier to fiddle with as a spreadsheet once you have basics of programming down, while getting rid of almost every disadvantage the spreadsheet has. You will find this in industry too: The researcher building the model is using the notebook, and then there's no need for an excel to code translation: The important bits can just be copied over directly.