Computer people hate cover letters because they're redundant, and so they annoy people like us. But this can't be stressed enough: HR people aren't computer people, even at software companies.
Anecdotal evidence: just last week a friend in HR at RedHat told me very matter-of-factly, "our intranet is a wiki!" She's a sweet girl, and very smart in her own field, but is nothing like your potential co-workers.
tghw works at Fog Creek, as do I. We're both software developers.
Here's the thing: your cover letter (hopefully) isn't redundant. If you want to think of it in computer terms: your résumé is data; your cover letter is the function through which to view the data. Your résumé may say that you only have experience working with VBScript. Your cover may tell us that you do that, but you hate it, so secretly, in your spare time, you pretend to be a fellow named _why, and write your own languages. Conversely, your résumé may be a shotgun approach to skills, but your cover letter sounds about as excited about coding as I personally am about doing my taxes. In neither case is the cover truly redundant; even if, in terms of raw data, your cover letter is redundant, it tells me more about you than your résumé ever could hope to.
I'd challenge you that, if there's a redundancy, it's the opposite of what you're positing: the résumé is for HR to tick crap off in a spreadsheet; the cover letter is for me as a person to learn who the hell you actually are.
Well put. FWIW, I actually agreed with the article, and intended my comment to be adding another reason why you should write a cover letter. "Because they seem redundant" would have been a better phrasing.
I think many people think that the time to express their personality is in the interview, and the resume stage is about screening candidates to interview based on data points. As such, they feel they will please the HR person most by being as succinct as possible, and so the cover letter like deadwood.
I say "I think" because I have never applied for or held a "real job" at any company that I didn't own, and my startup is just my co-founder and I. That said, I've helped a number of friends with their resumes, and have heard this sentiment frequently. But I think you guys have made a very strong case not only for including one, but what the goal of the cover letter should be, and I'll make sure to pass it along.
The problem is, interviews cost money. We fly every candidate in for a day of interviews and put them up in a nice Manhattan hotel. And that's the cheap part. The expensive part is taking developers' time to actually do the interview.
So while the interview most certainly looks at those sorts of things, we try to interview only when we're confident that a candidate has the potential to actually get the job.
Anecdotal evidence: just last week a friend in HR at RedHat told me very matter-of-factly, "our intranet is a wiki!" She's a sweet girl, and very smart in her own field, but is nothing like your potential co-workers.