He’s probably not going to get a senior software engineer position just by “grinding leetCode” if all he has done is pull tickets off the board in enterprise dev shops without showing “scope” and “impact” and without any system design know how.

That’s not meant to be an insult and from all indications from his question that’s what he has done - which is the same thing most of the 2.7 million devs in the US do. In fact that’s what I did for most of my career until 2 years ago.

The only reason I ended up in $BigTech was because I did have “system design”, project management, requirements gathering, and other soft skills that allowed me to get into the cloud consulting department (yes full time with the same 2 year signing bonus 5/15/40/40 vesting scheduling that all employees get).

I know there is a market for leetCode and I encourage my younger relatives who are graduating in CS to “grind leetCode”. I am pushing back on the thought process that 15 years of enterprise Dev experience means much of anything, at most he can get an SWE II position just by studying a few months.