Being a programmer generally sucks as a career. You are always fighting for your position against people who are younger than you, have more free time than you to keep up to date on the latest skills, and are willing to do your work for less money than you are. Programming is basically a commodity skill, and not a career unless you are one of the visionary 1%. And you aren't.

However, as a skill you use in another career, programming is VERY useful. But those context-specific skills can be learned on the job a lot faster than sitting through a general class for a general audience, and trying to extrapolate the meaningful bits to what you want to do. Screw that. Take an online course focusing on the methods and structures you are interested in, hack something together, and, if it works out, refine it later. Or pass it off to a junior level programmer to fix your code.

On the other hand, there are not many people who are genuinely skilled at network routing, and this market is EXPLODING. Like Mike Rowe of "Dirty Jobs" fame likes to say, there is a huge demand for good plumbers out there, because all the programmers in the world have toilets.

Well, all the programmers in the world need their network to work. And they don't know shit about a network closet, configuring routers, and managing network traffic. And there is only going to be MORE network traffic. The job ain't glamorous, but it pays well, and not many people are actually good at it.

Go for the CCNA. And then go learn how everyone other than Cisco does it. (F5, Avi, A10, etc.)