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Comment by inmygarage | Hacker News Reader

I think this article represents an extremely old-school view of hiring and job searches. Who writes cover letters any more? Granted, my view is completely biased toward tech companies, but believing that if you just have a "really good cover letter" that it will help you land your dream job I think is foolish.

All the people I know who have awesome jobs tried to meet as many people as they could from the company where they wanted to work (outside of the recruiting dept.) and made an impression by showing off actual skills - stuff they've worked on - as opposed to a great cover letter/resume.

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In my experience, the cover letter is still quite important. Last time I looked for jobs (a year ago) I cold-contacted some "hot" startups and included a cover letter and resume. The cover letter was very specific to each position, and detailed my fit for the position and my enthusiasm for the company. It was incredibly time-consuming to write those, but it paid off: I got a phone interview at nearly every place I applied.

I second that. A great cover letter won't be the sole reason you were hired for a job (or even a big reason), but it will be a big reason you were called in for the interview. And from my own experience, people who take the time to write a cover letter also tend to be people who do better on the subsequent interview (probably because candidates will only take the time write a cover letter for job positions that they're genuinely qualified to fill).

Joel Spolsky offers an interesting perspective (which I believe is right on) in his piece, "Getting Your Resume Read."

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/ResumeRead.html

cover letters are sometimes the only way to convey enthusiasm. conveying enthusiasm in a resume is quite difficult

Virtually everyone who has applied to Matasano has written a "cover letter" of some sort. The only ones who don't are clearly resume spammers. So the answer to your question is, from what I can tell, "everybody".

You're right that resumes are a crappy way to land a great job. To get a great job, pick 5 companies you desperately want to work for, ignore their job reqs, and track down the person inside each that runs the group that could hire you. Use your friends to help you do this, or to come up with ideas for companies to work for. Do not simply bounce around your network; that's a great way to lose 10 years of your life in mediocre roles. Notice how some of your friends have f'ing awesome gigs and some of them don't.

But: either do the resume/"job application" thing right, or don't bother doing it at all. Why waste your time? If the job is worth getting, it's worth playing the interview/negotiation game 100% perfectly.

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