I don't think this follows. To a degree, it's already true, because a lot of tech interviews just boil down to "have you learned all the pet CS questions in Cra

I don't think this follows. To a degree, it's already true, because a lot of tech interviews just boil down to "have you learned all the pet CS questions in Cracking the Coding Interview?". A CV just gets you the interview. Of course you're right, some companies have software to filter CVs by keywords, and often it's as dumb as if the ad says "experience with Puppet", you need to say "experience with Chef, which is like Puppet". This is just playing the game, like everything is. Why do they do this? If you've been involved with hiring, you know the number of terrible CVs even a small company will get is shocking, so I'm sympathetic to automating things a bit. A lot of them are minimal effort, but that's the best case. Worst case is a flat out lie, because it takes more effort to catch - usually during the interview. So if we accept that CVs aren't just useful for raw information, but also convey some kind of measure of diligence (e.g. spelling), which you want in a programmer, then knowing about tools is also a useful measure. So I don't think it's going to be as bad as you make it sound.