But unless you're a programmer, you can't really make out good code from bad code.
That's not always true. We recently dropped a small consulting company (~20 people, US based) that was awarded a small (but not necessarily trivial) project and really bungled things up. The end product was delayed numerous times, noticeably sluggish and riddled with bugs. It would have been an easy win for this company and would have led to more recurring work, but for whatever reason, they decided to assign the project to a single junior programmer without any oversight.
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That's not always true. We recently dropped a small consulting company (~20 people, US based) that was awarded a small (but not necessarily trivial) project and really bungled things up. The end product was delayed numerous times, noticeably sluggish and riddled with bugs. It would have been an easy win for this company and would have led to more recurring work, but for whatever reason, they decided to assign the project to a single junior programmer without any oversight.