&gt; This &quot;smart people creating for people less than them&quot; problem is exacerbated with students.<p>This is a great observation of a problem that extends throughout silicon valley. There is a fundamental problem with the way we design products that enables this &quot;condescension,&quot; as you aptly put it. The problem is that &quot;product people&quot; design an &quot;experience&quot; for the nebulous &quot;user&quot;. Instead of realizing that each user is also a <i>person</i>, with real experiences and a brain outside of the app, the designers fall into the trap of only thinking of each user within the context of their own app. The product designers ignore any experience that the user has outside of their own product, resulting in design choices that convey a tone of condescension to the user.<p>As you observe, this problem is particularly evident in education. The top offenders:<p>- Coding bootcamps<p>- &quot;Learn to code&quot; websites like codecademy<p>These products are not much different from the &quot;guru&quot; industry that peddles real estate and affiliate marketing eBooks to the &quot;get rich quick&quot; crowd. Someone searching &quot;how to make money fast&quot; is engaged in a slightly less sophisticated mindset than someone searching &quot;how to learn to code fast,&quot; but the same psychological impetus leads to both searches. As a result, an entire industry has emerged to prey on those learning to code.<p>Personally, I learned to code through a combination of online tutorials and rudimentary reverse engineering. How does this website work? What powers this website? How can I replicate this? Oh cool, a tutorial... let me finish this PHP membership system and then add my own features!<p>I maintain this is still the best way to learn to code. Taking things apart and building small projects is the fastest learning method. The tutorials were all free and very raw. They came from different sources that all presented different opinions and frameworks for thinking about programming.  I had to read between the lines. I had to think critically. There was no mindless interactive IDE simulator to click through. I only had the real world: a text editor, a hosted server to FTP my PHP files to, and a web browser. It was trial by fire.<p>Sure, coding bootcamps and codecademy have taught lots of people to &quot;code&quot;... but at what cost? What experiences have these people missed by learning through a structured, opinionated curriculum filtered through a product team? Has this method of learning created irreconcilable gaps in their understanding of programming?