A friend of mine was a uniformed programmer back when the Marine Corps had an MOS for that. He got out shortly after 9/11 and went on to become a Software Architect in the federal government. He actually has a very negative opinion of the concept of service member software engineers. I think his perspective is colored by his experience working for a Staff Sergeant who lat-moved into their MOS and was just completely useless as a programmer and by extension as a Team Lead or "Senior" Software Engineer. But the Marine Corps is notorious for abysmal Talent Management so YMMV...