If you are already a professional developer though, it's also questionable what is the added value. I'm willing to trust them that the quality is top notch, but it's basically a glorified tutorial; I have to agree with GP that the price point is way too high.

I think they're targeting professional developers with self-training/learning budgets. I'd be totally down for this if my company were willing to pay the time and subscription cost. I'd certainly rather do this than some F-tier shite about Agile or whatever.

Indeed, you're spot on!

Our current target is professional developers and teams with learning budgets.

Here are some reasons why experienced engineers have found value (the first expensed it, the second didn't):

1. One customer manages the Redis team at an infra company, and they used CodeCrafters as a starting point to get up-to-speed on Redis internals — to be able to do their job better. We ended up getting feedback from them on areas we could dive deeper on, to be useful to platform engineers in general.

2. A Distinguished Engineer at a Fortune 500 had built a database product before, and wanted to pick up a new language (Java, if I remember right). So they did our course because they preferred the "learning by doing" approach, and existing resources felt a bit too "hello world / todo-app"-ish.

The value is many devs know how to do their work but many might not know enough of the intricacies to build their own Redis for example. I do full stack and while I can make a website with a corresponding API, I don't know enough to rewrite Redis which includes more low-level backend knowledge than a typical fullstack engineer might have, so this would be useful for me.

From a customer call I had last night —

They were 4 years into their job, and felt that their job was mostly cobbling together a bunch of frameworks. Nothing wrong with that, but they constantly had the itch of not knowing how the pieces really tie together.

Their next goal is to explore platform engineering roles, which involves work that is one level lower in the stack.

Genuinely curious (both of us founders come from the early stage startup world where ladders are not in place yet) — what are the top resources for engineers trying to go up the technical ladder?