It's not really the work environment that matters. The people I really consider good programmers work in very small groups. However, the work group isn't everything. With Perlmonks and other online things, even a lone programmer can learn a lot from senior people. Indeed, I went out of my way to meet other people doing Perl so I could have someone to talk to. Don't be satisfied with what you find at work: check out a Perl Mongers group, read as much as you can online, try out new things, and so on.

As a counter-example, I've met a lot of really bad programmers in big shops. These are the sorts of people I would never hire. Really big companies have seats to fill and they take what they can get. Often, even though the company is large, they work in very small groups that don't talk to each other. I'm constantly surprised how compartmentalized a big company can be. Given a relatively senior bad programmer training the new hires can have the same disasterous results as the lone programmer who never talks to anyone.

The trick, no matter the work situation, is to talk to as many people as you can, or at least read the answers other people give to problems. You'll quickly figure out, for instance, about strict, warnings, and PERL vs. Perl.

We have a part to do in this too. The Perl community can be very unforgiving (and I'm not talking about Perlmonks necessarily, which happens to be on the more friendly side). The hapless newbie comes in looking for help and reassurance, but is often immediately attacked for lack of strictures, etc. We want people to get better, but we tend not to nice enough that they want to listen to us.