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.