Why not advertise the puzzle too? Isn't the point to get it solved?
If I have the technical skills to solve the types of problems that he wants solved, he needs to offer a lot more money and stability than 6 months.
People don't become paramedics or archaeologists for the paycheque, because often there's not that much monetary outcome from doing the work.
“Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success."
https://bookmarks.reviews/george-orwells-1940-review-of-mein...
Is that not already pretty excellent pay? I'm aware FAANG engineers and high level technical leaders make $300k+ or double that or more when you include their stock value, but for at least 90% of engineers even in the US "$120-250k" is a pretty top tier rate.
Starting up and maintaining any sort of community sounds like an intense position, especially over 3-6 months. This sounds like a “sleep at your desk” situation
But considering this is contract work, with no benefits, and involves solving a puzzle - aka success may be completely out of your control - it's not really that good of an offer, imho.
Someone may take it up for the fun though, or if they just happened to be laid off.
https://twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1589051044369420288
Avoid this guy like the plague.
Envy is a hell of a drug. Avoid it like the plague.
Highly skilled tech people don't sleep at their desk for Elon Musk. No one is envious of that.
Whatever it is, its silly enough that Nat Friedman feels like people will ridicule him if he actually says it out loud. That, or JJ Abrams style mystery box storytelling is a skill mastered by tech founders.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunung_Padang
Or recent unearthings in Turkey such as Karahan Tepe:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karahan_Tepe
"We have the technology" to make sense (specifically, to make 3D models) of old and emerging underground sensing techniques, but haven't pulled something cohesive and coherent together yet.
Such a tool could then be applied to these and more sites around the planet which at present are still painstakingly investigated using techniques from the 1800s one toothbrush at a time.
The fact it's very difficult to crack because unlike other ancient scripts it does not have multiple languages reference or its own equivalent version of Rosetta Stone [2]. In order to crack it most probably massive datasets and AI are required.
[1]Why Is Indus Script Language Still Undeciphered?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Rd0ssSmxGw
[2] Rosetta Stone:
I guarantee this project will not be solving new problems in ML, and everything they do will be implementing, scaling, and optimizing the compute required for existing methods. This is engineering problems applied to archeology, and not the need to solve computer/data science problems that require new science to achieve. Maaaybe you get some new IP for using ML to process lidar and gravimetry data (I know some people involved in doing this from space), but if I were pitching on this, I would lead with being open to new science, but demonstrate a track record on getting solved problems implemented. Make sure the incentives of your team are aligned and that they can commit to the mission, as side of the desk science projects are probably the main risk to this effort, I would speculate.
The qualifications unfortunately make it sound like yet another one of those "do CV to find relationships between probably unrelated objects" projects that have been so problematic in the past though.
