I may be biased, but the amount of "putting them in their place" comments is disproportional to how much they overestimate themselves. I doubt Tiffany thinks that she's going to be debugging C++ for Google's [redacted] within the year, for example.
Others' accomplishments might seem tiny compared to where you are, but gradually realizing that there's always more to learn is part of the growing process. All of this "putting things into perspective" is perhaps unnecessary - when I got started, I certainly didn't (and couldn't) have had as wide of a perspective as I do now.
I wrote: "putting [the achievements of others] in context of a greater whole". This has nowhere near the negative connotations that you're implying.
>All of this "putting things into perspective" is perhaps unnecessary
Perspective is always important as it allows us to celebrate how far we've come and remain humble at how much remains.
Personally, I've seen too many CS101 students get an over-inflated ego after they are told that they've become "hacking Gods" after setting up their own blog and playing with customizing the CSS.
Others' accomplishments might seem tiny compared to where you are, but gradually realizing that there's always more to learn is part of the growing process. All of this "putting things into perspective" is perhaps unnecessary - when I got started, I certainly didn't (and couldn't) have had as wide of a perspective as I do now.