How do you make pre-commit vetting of code quality scale, especially on a low headcount, high velocity team?
Make sure to hire only top notch. Vetting goes faster when everybody knows what they are doing (yes, this is sort of a "duh!").
Without impacting the weekly velocity numbers that people not involved in said code reviews are used to seeing?
No idea what "weekly velocity" is or who is making that number up in your company but I suggest to start measuring in months and quarters for a tangible idea of effectiveness. Forest, Trees.
high-quality man hours ... expected to actually produce
So, a bit like these velocity points in Pivotal Tracker, only... even more detached from reality?
I'll let you in on why measuring mostly anything related to code in weeks is wrong: It promotes short-term thinking and code debt, not unlike what we have seen in the banking blowup.
Yes, there are classes of tasks that can be solved in a week-timeframe. But those are not normally the ones that make or break your project.
For a small, contrived example: You can hire a low-skilled worker to provision new servers. You can then measure how many servers that person gets done per week.
Or you can hire a high-skilled worker to build infrastructure for provisioning servers with a mouseclick.
This will take months. But once finished you have saved yourself an ongoing full-time salary and can assign the high-skilled worker to other tasks.
Good luck determining that high-skilled workers "weekly velocity", though...
Make sure to hire only top notch. Vetting goes faster when everybody knows what they are doing (yes, this is sort of a "duh!").
Without impacting the weekly velocity numbers that people not involved in said code reviews are used to seeing?
No idea what "weekly velocity" is or who is making that number up in your company but I suggest to start measuring in months and quarters for a tangible idea of effectiveness. Forest, Trees.