Well co-author. First author is one thing, co-author is another. And I no way mean any disrespect to someone who obviously has contributed a great deal to his field.

That's not always true at all and varies greatly from one sub-field to another. I have read countless top-conference papers where the authorship are obviously attributed in alphabetical order.

I don't think there's the concept of first author in theoretical CS? All the papers I've seen there follow the same practice as in Math, where authors are just alphabetical.

No matter how they are listed, someone is probably doing a disprortionate share of the team wrangling and managing the process to publication.

That's another matter entirely. Yes, authors don't always bring equal contribution and effort into an academic work. But, here it's someone claiming that not being first author is a major deal, or bears any significance at all, when in fact it doesn't.

I read the claim that not being first author (who in may, but not all—IIRC, e.g., biosciences are different—other fields is normally the person who is the administrative point) means less irreducible management overhead limiting total throughput, in response to a comment indication that the shear administrative overhead of the number of publications seemed prohibitive.

My concern was not about the administrative burden of publishing but of the difficulty of actually finding results which are publishable.

I'm not sure which the original comment though.

What is considered a paper in CS is different than in many other fields. That is not to say the content is not worthy of publication, just that they tend to be shorter and often are more focused on a single issue. There are also publications in conference proceedings that are usually an easier review process. Looking at his top 10 by citation count on google scholar shows most in proceedings and under 10 pages. Arguably it is more intellectual work, but the process is less arduous so the rate isn't that insane.

"There are also publications in conference proceedings that are usually an easier review process." this is not really true; in systems conferences, for example, you might get 7 or even 10 long, detailed reviews about your work; most papers are rejected (say 80-90% out of 300); a shepherd ensures that if accepted, the paper is appropriately revised. And, it's different in most every subfield of CS. So why make the overly broad (and wrong) generalization?

> There are also publications in conference proceedings that are usually an easier review process.

The big CS conferences are around 20% acceptance rate, Science and Nature are around 7%. So while easier than Science, that is still quite an accomplishment!

Getting a paper into high-impact conferences are definitely still an incredible accomplishment, but comparing these acceptance rates is a bit misleading. Those CS conferences have a very narrow scope, while Science and Nature literally cover any topic pertaining to science and nature... including CS :).

less arduous is a bit subjective no? different types of intellectual labor different types of standards etc including length.