"Coding is the easy part"
Yes...but, only for really good engineers.
I also disagree, coding is the easy part. When you are junior not everyone requires from you to be know-it-all person nor providing super-good quality code, especially in your first months of journey in the company codebase. However, almost anyone wants to notice a "fresh air" and a person who shares his/her commitment in various form starting from the day one.
Edit: Hey, it is easy to implement code having bugs (shortly: implement bugs) and do many fixes further. It is hard to understand the problem and write code once, which won't need any bugfix. Think about the Apollo-11 code [0] - one tiny bug and astronauts might be dead.