I think this is a great idea, but agreeing with other commenters minimum wage is likely far too low. My brother and I are fairly new to ruby on rails, and we often get stuck and left at the mercy of support forums and friendly programmers. Many times we'd gladly pay for an "office hours" type service, especially since one hangup can cost us a day or two... one model might be to try letting users post questions along with an ideal price range and let programmers bid to answer it, like a stack overflow for business users.
What I'd do is white-label it and make it available (revenue share) with communities/networks. e.g., say ForumX always has newbies struggling to install their code and get things working, and a voluntary support forum isn't always ideal. So they run paidsupport.forumx.com (or whatever) as a marketplace for cheap installation help. Scrape x% from the transactions to split between ForumX and WageMachine.
I like prawns idea, seems like something definitely testable.
I was just going to throw out "google answers" service which was basically the same as what you are saying but for any type of question, and did not seem to work out.
