Your self-awareness is a good sign. My predecessor was a self-taught cowboy coder with no one to draw comparisons with. He was the lead (read: only) software engineer at my company, barring fresh graduates that didn’t know any better.
Then I came along to point out all of his anti-patterns & cruft. By that point, he was too entrenched & self-assured in his abilities to listen to reason. Some people have imposter syndrome, others are imposters that failed upwards in spite of their incompetence.
Sean, if you’re reading this - fuck you. I’m still coming across code you refuctored
Kinda ironic that Amazon.com is killing its namesake through its carbon footprint