Well, there are two parts to this. First of all, here (Phoenix) the market is very full of the "I program because it pays the bills" sort, and when we do a posting we review hundreds of candidates (either who directly contact us or are sent to us). Of those hundreds, I'll talk to probably 30 to 50. Of that 30 to 50, maybe 5 or 6 will come in for a face to face. The conversation around software is a great start and it saves me a TON of time when screening candidates by phone. Once there here we can talk code samples or details.

The second part is that it is inevitable that someone will eventually talk a good talk but be unable to actually walk the walk. That's when it's nice that we're in a right to work state. There's no point keeping someone on if they can't do the job you've hired them to do.

Of course, all that being said, this only works because we are a small shop, and the person doing the hiring is the same person who will work with "the new guy" from day one. This makes it loads easier than having to deal with hiring for someone else's department or even company.

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.