As a self-taught programmer I started out with completely the opposite level of confidence, and considered myself a really lousy programmer.

I always assumed there were all these "real", "professional" programmers out there that really knew what they're doing, pick crystal clear abstractions, had profound knowledge of security implications, database optimization, data structure usage, good use of object orientation, introduced no memory leaks, knew just what algorithm to pick and wrote great, clear and understandable code.

I still kinda think I suck, but at least now I know that I'm not alone :)