I think that it is on a spectrum from sysadmin work to software development work. The closer something is to engineering doctrine, the closer it is to systems administration. If company A wants a Linux VM with Apache and some static pages, there is some per-customer work versus company B, but it is very easily estimated. All of the differentiation lies in cost or customer service at that point. And there is a lot of corporate programming that gets close to that, and is more estimatable than other stuff.