[wheels]

Conversely, I generally don't read books on software design. I buy books on business, math, graduate level CS, occasionally programming languages (but then usually just to get something I can go through once and quickly) - but not software engineering. It just seems so ... well, put bluntly, the concepts covered in most of those books are pretty boring and part of the conventional wisdom of engineering culture.

The crowd that reads all of the software engineering books seems to be evenly split between good engineers and wankers.

I want to see a portfolio with real code behind it. I want to read your code. If I can't do that, you've probably not convinced me you're a good programmer, no matter how much you can talk the talk.