That fits in with my experience. It is very difficult to judge your own skill accurately unless you have sufficient exposure to other programmers. For years I worked either solo or with one other developer, and all along I thought I was a damn good perl programmer. Mostly because I was the only perl programmer I knew that understood globs and tie.

A few years ago I realized that I was an ok perl coder, but a horrible engineer. I wrote clever and unmaintainable code, and not a single test case. I then adopted the policy of being maintainable instead of clever.

My most recent awakening came from taking part in discussions on perlmonks. I have learned more from answering questions here than I have from many of the books on my shelf.