On the usefulness of advice.

A few of the points stressed by sites that peddle advice on finding a job include things like "never send a resume without a cover letter" and "avoid the one-liner cover letter that says 'please consider my application for this position'".

Oddly enough, of the three employers that have actually responded to my applications, I didn't send any cover letter at all to one, and I sent the Forbidden One-Liner to another. Nearly every application that I've slaved over to produce a well-written cover letter (going by the common wisdom I get from just about everyone) has apparently gone straight to /dev/null. I'm beginning to think I should just quit wasting my time on these things and aim for quantity rather than quality.