This is a Mexican standoff. You aren't willing to write a cover letter, because a machine might be reading it, and we are getting resumes that, on their own, a

This is a Mexican standoff. You aren't willing to write a cover letter, because a machine might be reading it, and we are getting resumes that, on their own, are just a "maybe" along with 100+ other "maybes". On the other side, we have been inundated with "fire and forget" resumes that make it hard: why should we invest time in your resume when you haven't invested time in your application? In our case, we have 3 out of 10 people at the company reviewing these resumes (CTO, senior sysadmin, full-stack dev). We are committing significant resources to reviewing applications. If you are going to optimize for submitting to a machine that scores your application, don't be surprised that a human isn't reading your application.