[nomel]

I've been involved in hiring at several tech companies, including two top 5. Cover letters were never considered in any part of the interview process. Our recruiters didn't even include them in the candidate packet. So, there definitely isn't any uniformity in the way cover letters are perceived.

[chefandy]

I never said you couldn't get a very prestigious job without a cover letter. In fact, I'm positive top 5 companies are far less likely to care about cover letters than many organizations. They want to hire people who are mostly excited about the code and solving exciting problems that come up while the company does its thing. Get a stack of resumes, sort by pedigree and experience, put them in front of a whiteboard to make sure they weren't lying, get them in some interviews to make sure they aren't total jerks, and you're off to the races.

If you want to work with a think tank, a nonprofit doing exciting and important work, a startup with an amazing idea that really captures your imagination, or any other org where the big picture needs to matter as much or more to everybody involved than the content of the PRs, then the cover letter likely matters more than the resume.

No judgement. I use those top 5 products. It's just pretty myopic to deem cover letters as unnecessary when that's only true for people with very specific goals and ideas about what matters in a job, even if they happen to be very common.

[notch656a]

The only reliable component about getting a job is being a desirable candidate. That's it. Maybe you write some great cover letters. I have worked for both startup and non-profit without writing a cover letter. Sometimes a resume and a glass of whiskey with the CEO is enough to get these jobs. I could probably get a job just as easily with a bottle of whiskey and two glasses as I could with a cover letter. Although the whiskey is the only one of the two I've any experience with.

[chefandy]

Well of course being a desirable candidate is a prerequisite-- this thread is about cover letters as a means of conveying that. I've interviewed hundreds of candidates for dozens of positions-- from internships to regular staff developers to post-doc roles-- in an organization that drew ambitious candidates that shared our specific interests from around the globe. Our organization, at large, immediately rejected resumes with search-and-replace template or missing cover letters, by the hundreds, because people's hard skills and experience weren't the primary factors in determining whether or not they would thrive in this organization. As I've repeatedly acknowledged, there are many jobs, candidates, and job searching scenarios where that's not the case. Surely, the glass of whiskey scenario makes sense in many contexts, but in ours, it's wholly inapplicable. I'm not really sure why you insistently present your own use case for job application materials as an argument against what I said, but I've stopped caring and I'm done engaging you about it.

[nomel]

> I never said you couldn't get a very prestigious job without a cover letter.

I didn't suggest this, at all. I suggested the value of a cover letter is not some constant across the tech sector, from startups (sample size = 2) to the big 5 (sample size = 2).

[BeetleB]

I agree with you, but people have strong opinions on this on HN. See past discussion:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15934135

I wish I could find the golden comment of an HN user realizing that he has used cover letters to exclude candidates, but he can't do that for those who didn't supply one - putting the latter at an advantage.