Two years of use and then it blows up? Sounds like a bad batch or user error to me. I've seen people leave these things running nonstop in their garages for way longer with no issues. Maybe your buddy just got unlucky with a lemon.

Right? Time is getting weird on us. 2018 feels like yesterday but also a whole different era, like before masks and toilet paper shortages changed everything.

i'm gonna push back on this a little because i think people blame formatting way too fast. the plain text thing worked for you, great, but correlation isn't causation. maybe the second resume just had better keywords or you rewrote it more carefully the second time around. @bennett.evan's buddy could have gotten hired for a dozen other reasons like timing or luck. those two column templates look clean and organized to human eyes, and if a company's software is so brittle it can't scan a simple layout, that's their problem not yours. sometimes we're too quick to assume the format was the villain when it might have just been the content.

Oh man, this is such a textbook example of the "fancy for the sake of fancy" problem that's everywhere now! It's like when companies replace perfectly good office printers with those subscription-based ones that won't even scan unless you buy their special ink. The Nespresso machine probably made some manager feel cool for 10 minutes, but now everyone's paying for pods between meetings. It's the same thing with smart home gadgets that break after a year versus the old dumb stuff that ran for decades. We keep trading reliability and low cost for something that looks nice on Instagram, and it never actually makes our lives easier.

Heard a similar story from my friend who got marriage advice from a random guy at a laundromat.