>The reviewer could have sat down with the person before a single line of code was written.
This is a bigger waste of time. If every change requires asking someone in person, that's an infinite source of distraction and kills productivity for that person.
MOST code reviews don't end up in comments asking for big changes, and when they do the one-time cost on the author is much better to pay than the constant tax on your subject matter experts of what you're proposing.
How is spending 5 minutes x TEAM_SIZE to go over what you're going to do more time than 1-2 days solving a problem, then another hour or two for the reviewer to write out why it's wrong, then another day or two rewriting everything from scratch?
* Reasonably-sized CLs take 5-10 minutes to review - if I have things to say. Much less if the code looks good and I don't have any requests.
* I cannot think of any CL in the last 5 years where I made a comment that caused someone to "rewrite everything from scratch". Most feedback can be done in a few clicks in an IDE which supports refactor or a few minutes of copy/paste.
This is a bigger waste of time. If every change requires asking someone in person, that's an infinite source of distraction and kills productivity for that person.
MOST code reviews don't end up in comments asking for big changes, and when they do the one-time cost on the author is much better to pay than the constant tax on your subject matter experts of what you're proposing.