Meh, I was in the Air Force as 3C0X2, the actual Computer Programmer.
You're missing the point of the article, in the end you had to get out, because it doesn't make any sense to stay in. When you work hard or have at least half a brain you take your clearance and run.
Funny thing about these career fields, they have terrible retention, so to fix this they offer high reenlistment bonus and low enlistment bonuses. This leads to the ARRRR-tard from the flight line cross training who signed up for his job of "loading bullets into plane" being a manager of a group of IT guys. This leads to micromanaging and doing things for others while they take you're credit. It also leads to an 18 year old kid, being on 24/7 call because others are incompetent.
I used to work at Langley and being part of a Web Team I did some web programming. I didn't do anything real until I transferred to NSA. Now we run everything, switches, cabling, I have several large frame rooms with OPS servers that include Linux, UNIX (9&10), Windows 2003, Citrix Servers, AD, Exchange, to VMware.
As soon as my first enlistment was up, I rolled out and doubled my salary. That alone shows that they military doesn't respect there soldiers. The only person who would reenlist that had half a brain has issues in his life he doesn't want to disclose on the full polygraph the civilians & contractors get. Or he/she is just LAZY, period.
The AF at least is phasing out the actual programmer. They have cross trained most of the friends I had, with the lack of retention they could barely keep anyone in that could take on large projects. The only thing I KNOW programmers still run is the Air Force's website and they do programming on the AWAKS. But I'm sure even a lot of that is contractors.