Comment by Der_Einzige

This is 100% true, if anything you’re massively undercounting the value of publications.

Most industry AI jobs that aren’t research based know that NeurIPS publications are a huge deal. Many of the managers don’t even know what a workshop is (so you can pass off NeurIPS workshop work as just “NeurIPS”)

A single first author main conference work effectively allows a non Ph.D holder to be treated like they have a Ph.d (be qualified for professional researcher jobs). This means that a decent engineer with 1 NeurIPS publication is easily worth 300K+ YOY assuming US citizen. Even if all they have is a BS ;)

And if you are lucky to get a spotlight or an oral, that’s probably worth closer to 7 figures…