[frankreyes]

Cover letters were required 100 years ago when CVs and resumes had to be delivered by postal mail and the secretary of the company had to direct the CV to the right application and job description, and phone calls or face interviews were not available or practical, because travelling took literally days.

Cover letters are literally a "cover" to a resume saying why are you sending that resume.

Today, that's just the subject of the email with the resume as attachment.

Today, cover letters provide no value to any involved party, and as you can see they can be easily played and manipulated. You're just adding more hoops to your own detriment.

[notahacker]

> cover letters provide no value to any involved party

This might be true of a generic letter that's either written by AI or might as well be. But it's absolute nonsense in the general case.

Employers would much prefer to deal with the 5% of people who have actually read the ad than the 95% that hit autoapply on everything from the job board. Especially since a couple of sentences on the most relevant aspects of your career is much less effort for them than extracting the same information from 2 pages of resume covering mostly irrelevant stuff. They cover the sort of motivations and experiences you'd never put on a general CV which get candidates would otherwise be extremely borderline interviews. I've literally not binned of CVs of people later hired, based entirely on stuff included only in their cover letter.

Since interviews are a much bigger waste of time than reading and writing cover letters, arguably even the really bad cover letters help both parties. You can intentionally negative screen companies with tone and expectations too...

[bazmattaz]

I disagree. For companies that I’m really passionate about working for I’ll craft a custom cover letter where I try to explain why I want to work for that company in particular and include some information about my experience. Sure most of the experience is in the CV but my passion for the company and the market they operate in doesn’t come across in my CV. I’m a PM not a dev of that makes a difference