Co-First Authorship

Co-first authorship is a sham, and only serves as a political compromise to placate non-first authors. Grant/fellowship peer reviewers and hiring or promotion/tenure committees understand this, and therefore give little additional weight to the designation as co-first author of a second or third author. In addition, the designation co-first authors does not take any weight whatsoever away from the first authorship of the first-listed author. I will leave it to our readers to figure out why this remains the case even if there is a footnote stating that the co-first authors are listed in alphabetical order. (Just to be clear, this pertains to the biomedical sciences; co-first authorship may have a different significance in other disciplines.)
UPDATE: Check this shit out!
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/322/5909/1865
The second and third authors are asterisked as “equal contributors”! What a motherfucking joke. The only people in the entire world who could possibly give a shit about that are their parents. HAHAHAHAHAH!