I must have misread the question because I could have sworn he wasn't asking for advice on how to budget his money.

I actually did the opposite of what you did. Granted it was 15 years ago, but I was in core infrastructure networking and went into software. Not for any reasons of job security, but because I really wanted to get into some of the value that the network was delivering.

However, since then a really interesting thing has happened. SDN has made the network into much more than the sorts of things a CCIE would do. There will still be jobs for network engineers in the traditional sense, but what you may want to explore is how you can use your software skills to help networks run better, because SDN is allowing networks to do things that OSPF, BGP and MPLS can only dream of. Getting an understanding of infrastructure networking (both from the LAN and WAN side) will only make you a better software engineer, and being a software engineer will also make you a better network engineer. To quote Wayne Gretzky (who was famously quoted by Steve Jobs), go where the puck will be, not where it is.

The comparison to Facebook is complete BS.

Even though (as somebody already pointed out) the $634m number doesn't represent just Healthcare.gov, the comparison to Facebook is completely fallacious. Facebook has money coming in other than just their investments; the investment money that is referenced in the Crunchbase page is in addition to any other income that they had. In other words, Facebook spent way more than $634m in that period of time.

Lazy journalism at its best.