I do it because: It looks baller, I get positive comments on it in my interviews every time, and it's easier than using Word. Why typeset when computers can for you?
I've never fretted over and spent so much time on minutia of typesetting as I have with LaTeX.
I suppose it's fine if you're satisfied with some default look that someone else has come up with for your document. But for me that's never good enough.
I want my documents to look a certain way, and it's virtually never the case that any LaTeX class or document style looks good enough with the default settings. So I wind up doing endless tweaking until finally it looks the way I want it to.
Of course, by then it does look brilliant. And the time spent is well worth it. But you do have to put in the time to get these kinds of results, if the default settings don't suit you.
See the section "Format once, change the content a lot" in the article. (particularly important with resumes) If that's not true in your case, you're almost by definition using LaTeX incorrectly.
First, it assumes that at some point you'll settle on some perfect formatting for all time. That's really unlikely (especially for me).
Second, it assumes that the same resume format is appropriate for each prospective employer you'll be sending your resume to. There are many who feel you should tailor your resume to the employer you're sending it to. That could certainly include tailoring the format, depending on how different the jobs you're applying for are. A resume for a web design job might look very different from one for a programming job. And many people do both.
Third, it assumes your LaTeX skills will never improve and you'll never discover new styles or fonts or tricks you'll want to apply to your resume to make it better in the future. Things you didn't know at the time you first wrote it.
All these are potentially incorrect assumptions. There are some great reasons to keep tinkering with the formatting, even in LaTeX.
That said, I never implied in my original post that the reason that I spent a lot of time futzing with the formatting in LaTeX was because I was re-formatting stuff I'd already formatted to my satisfaction once. No. In fact, it took a long time to format it in the first place.
Yes, it's true that maybe this will save me time and grief in the long run (if I can let sleeping dogs lie, and not try to improve the formatting once I've settled on one I like), but maybe not.
Anyway, I'm not trying to convince anyone to ditch LaTeX and switch to Word. I love LaTeX. And I hate it. It's a love/hate thing. There are some really great things about it. It can make your documents look marvelous, and you can do some amazing things with it.
But it can also be very frustrating (especially if you want to do stuff that's non-standard, and varies too far from the defaults that the (often broken) document classes had in mind when they were written).
