Make friends with other good engineers that are good interviewees. They will teach you some skills, and give personal references for you at their companies when you need a job. Personal references are going to get you the really good jobs, not applying online and going through the standard interview process.
That's not really true. At good companies you're still going to need to interview, even with a strong reference.
You may not need to prove yourself technically as much as someone who comes in cold, but you always need to prove that you're a good cultural fit for the team.
I'd hire you if you were a good engineer but not a good interviewee :). My hope would be that a good interviewer can see through an interview in the same way that a good teacher gives good grades to good students, not good test takers.
If you can tell that a bad interviewee is a good engineer, you've cracked the elusive interview code that everyone has been trying to figure out for decades.
A teacher has an ongoing relationship with a student, so time is on their side. An interview is the opposite.
Hiring a good engineer that is a bad interviewee is the responsibility of the interviewer. A sufficiently good interviewer should be able to pull the necessary info out of a bad interviewee.
The ironic thing is that you'd probably have zero issues finding a job at a BigCo, which don't often use the same interrogation techniques as startups and tech companies.
I've only had one job search so far, but I got much more "where do you see yourself in X years" and "tell me about a time..." nonsense at larger companies. Startups were much more interested in what I had done, and they actually looked at my Github account.
But there's one thing in particular that annoys me here:
And by the way, if you’re a good engineer you’ll have zero issue finding another job. Zero.
You'all have zero issues finding a new job if you're a good interviewee, but not necessarily if you're a good engineer. I know lots of people (myself included) who are at least decent engineers but terrible interviewees.