My friend recently spoke with a medical company about a contract position developing a computer vision app for mobile devices. While he has worked on medical-related projects before and has some programming experience, he is a mechanical engineer by trade and has never coded for mobile platforms or worked on computer vision problems before.
He reached out to me before speaking with the company asking for my advice on how to tackle the problem they are trying to solve. I recently sold my company (where I was the lead/only programmer) that did just that: computer vision applications on mobile devices for medical applications, and received my masters degree in computer vision, so I'm fairly versed in the subject. Now I do contract/consulting for various companies (similar to this one).
It sounds like the problem he is trying to solve is a fairly complex computer vision problem--not one that can be solved by simple image filtering--and one that would take a lot of experimentation and trial and error to get right. I am assuming that if he gets/takes this position, he'll want to use me a fairly heavy resource. He said we could work together and possibly split some of money, but I feel like that is a strange position to be in.
He's also planning on charging them 50% more than I charge my clients, since they are a big, well-known company with deep pockets.
The things I'm struggling are He's a good friend, so I want to support him, but at the same time I feel I would be doing most of the technical work, while he would get most of the credit and money.
Is there a way that I can utilize him and complete the project so that we both get equal credit and pay?