Huemer's polemic against letters of recommendation

David Boonin (Colorado) kindly calls to my attention his colleague Michael Huemer's case against soliciting letters of recommendation.  Prof. Huemer is always pleasingly contrarian, though it seems to me his case is stronger in this instance when it comes to letters of recommendation for senior candidates rather than rookies.  With regard to rookies (1) no appointments committee has time to review in detail the submitted work of all applicants; (2) pedigree (the applicant was trained at a program with which one has had good experiences) is both under- and over-inclusive for narrowing the applicant pool down; (3) the same goes for publications; and (4) letters can be quite helpful, as long as one knows how to read them.  If one does appointments enough, one gets better at deciphering the codes in which they are written, and you learn who is reliable and who isn't (in the late 1980s and 1990s, Hilary Putnam wrote one too many time in letters of recommendation that "now I know what it was like to have Wittgenstein in class" that it became a joke in the profession--none of those young philosophers, to the best of my recollection, turned out to be major figures in philosophy).