I don't think you can say that programming is automatically much harder than being a good business analyst/PM. I personally don't envy that job position and I think that it has to be pretty difficult, not in terms of technical know-how and sheer logical intellect, but because you have to be able to play both sides of the fence so-to-speak. A business analyst has the unenviable duty of trying to please everyone, but is usually liked by nobody. They have to get the project requirements almost as close to perfect as possible (which is impossible) and be able to make management feel warm and fuzzy about what they're doing and also not piss off the programmers too much. Most of these people get to sit in long, horrible meetings, with tedious corporate types that make you want to gauge your eyes out with a fountain pen, only then to get to talk to a bunch of developers that hate their guts almost instantly. I think the sheer stress of the job is probably worth an extra couple of bucks per week!

These days though, at least in my organization, we got rid of these types of people because often they were a drain on productivity. We adopted more agile methods of development and forced developers to get out there and actually interact with users instead of relying on a third-party to act as a go between and try to pin down every single process in the business and reduce it to a series of impressive looking charts and documents that nobody will ever really read. I'm sure there are really excellent business analyst-type people out there that really know how to handle the situation elegantly but the ones I have worked with looked like they were seconds away from hari cari.