Despite all the hype and blustering, most orgs out there are not doing a high level of orchestration through Chef/Puppet/Ansible/etc., and individual system/network admins aren't in danger of being completely replaced by programmers and software devs. But, it can definitely help be a point of differentiation between candidates. Also, how are they going to be able to tell whether you taught yourself Python (or whatever), or you learned it on the job, just like any other skill? In an interview they'll probably ask what you've done with the skill, and then maybe a brief demonstration.

Like, in an interview, I'm not going to ask someone to tell me what the default hello timer is for RSVP LSP tunnel on a Juniper router. But, I would probably ask them to give me sort of a high-level overview of what needs to be done, like "OK enable MPLS on these interfaces, enable RSVP globally, define the LSP(s), etc." Assuming you got that right or mostly right, and your resume makes it sound like you know a lot about programming/scripting too, the next thing I'd ask is a high-level overview of what you would do to script out the operation. Obviously, there's a ton of answers that will work, what I'm curious to find is if you're going to tell me how you're going to do this, is it just going to a really simple Expect-style script that just hammers out the config, maybe uses a text file or 2 that you made of various values, different IP addresses, as string variables? Or are you going to build out a template in YANG or YAML? Is it going to have any checks either before or after applying the new config, some kind of quick test result or output? To me, how you answer questions like that is a lot more indicative of what you really know or can actually apply with your programming knowledge. After all, most likely someone somewhere has already published a code snippet to github that ultimately does what you want. What's valuable is being able to pick an appropriate tool and apply it to whatever the situation is. But, make no mistake, it's just the tool. Someone could know every last detail about a circular saw, how fast it spins, what the blade's made of, how hot it gets, how much noise it makes, how much electricity it uses, but they still have to know how to build the house. So if your background's in asset management, you ain't gonna pivot to being a server admin solely because you learned Powershell, or become a virtualization engineer just because you know Python (maybe a junior-level one, but that of course doesn't pay as well). But you can definitely stand out from your peers by learning how to take something you used to do manually and automate that process, or even just a part of the process.