In the tech industry (design, marketing, programming) we're seeing that companies don't care about credentials when they see an awesome portfolio. Google VP of People Ops said they no longer care about GPAs [1]

On the other hand, one of our students from Spain managed to convince his university to validate one of our courses as credits. So I don't know. But the trend is towards projects > diplomas.

(However, for papers, that's gonna take a while)

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/23/opinion/sunday/friedman-ho...

yeah that's truly incredible. If I'd spent the first two years of my university education learning from a tool like Platzi, I'd be in an incredible place. Can't wait for @freddier to redo the badass "intro to programming course" in English so I can show it to a few folks I know who struggled to adapt to formal CS education

That's awesome news!

> You don't have a phd, you can't be first author on this paper

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that either you're in a very archaic field or institution, or that your PI is not a nice person. In the US at least, even undergraduates are routinely first authors on papers where they did the majority of work.

This was in tandem with a Canadian researcher, so maybe.

I suspect that part of it is that I'm not in any sort of academic pipeline (I got out of school with a BSc, essentially apprenticed myself under a nautical engineer for a few years, then opened a workshop).

If you don't need the publication, use that to your advantage: refuse to publish unless you get named first (were applicable) - the other guy can either accept or perish.