A code review service? Interesting idea. But utilization is the bugaboo, because without good utilization the cost per hour or cost per review would be very high.

You want your reviews done by a high-end professional - someone who could consult for perhaps $150 and hour or more - or at least that's what a firm would charge for such a person. Typically a salaried consultant makes about 55% of what a firm charges, or a consultant using a head-hunter firm might make 75%. But let's look at it from the firm's perspective, because they need to pay the salary AND benefits AND fund sales and accounting, etc.

So they need to generate about $280,000 per reviewer per year to stay in business.

And here's where it gets complex. Reviewing isn't a full-time gig like consulting. Rather than 90% utilization on average, I'd be surprised if you could get 50% utiliziation. So now the hourly rate doubles to $300 (yes, my math is fuzzy, but you get the idea).

Not too many people, or companies even, are going to pay $300/hr to get their code reviewed...

And yet if the firm charges less, then they have to pay the people less, and that (almost by definition) means they'll get less qualified people. Because anyone who _could_ be billed out at $150 will simply move to another firm where they can get paid better...

Of course there are other business models (retainers, pay-per-review, etc.), but all of them are bound by the same underlying cost structure - the need to employ high-end people, the need to do sales/marketing/accounting and the need of the firm's owners to make money.

Yeah, if there's some way people could do this as "filler" work it could make sense. Virtually all (non-indy) consultants are bound by oontracts that would prohibit such work, but indy consultants and IT workers could probably band together into a consortium, pay some dues or whatever to fund marketing/accounting and have a go at it.

Hehe :)

Of course I was just throwing out numbers - ones that would make sense in Minneapolis or Chicago, but might be a bit low in San Francisco or New York and a bit high in many other places. But even in Oklahoma I very much doubt a consulting firm would charge less than $125 for the type of person we're talking about for such a service... That's what this type of person went for 1997 anyway (Which is pre-bubble, so it is (I think) a relatively valid number. No numbers from 1999-2001 have any value at all, because they were bubble-numbers and never did reflect reality.)

Yes, there are VERY qualified people sitting in many IT shops. Some of them may make $90k - but that works out to a ~$166/hr billing rate if they worked at a salaried consulting firm, so they are in the range :)

The point though, is that such a service would need expensive resources to be credible. While you can find the odd, underpaid expert out there, you can't build a business model on the chance of exploiting a few naive people - because they don't remain naive when exposed to a wide range of cusotmers.

(btw, in a previous life I was a manager at a relatively large consulting firm. Not my idea of a fun job, but it was certainly educational...)

On the other hand, if this is a part-time moonlighting gig the rules would be different. If you are an IT developer by day, hot-shot code reviwer by night, you might take less money to do the work. Additionally, it would solve the primary issue with the whole business model - which is utilization. Given hourly 1099 workers, utilization becomes a non-issue. You only pay for hours worked, so you have far less ugly overhead.

The question then, is whether enough talented IT devs want to give up some of their "off time" to do this? I dunno :)