Thank you for sharing your method with us. It worked for you and should work for others. I'd however like to point out, certain assumptions baked into this, before anyone starts to follow it:
>>. Make a list of companies that I would apply to and sort them from most interesting to no-way-in-hell-i-am-working-here order
This is easy to do if you're in the valley/NY. Outside of the valley, people often don't know many companies besides G and F. Making such a list is a valuable exercise, but quite hard for many people, simply because of lack of knowledge and credible sources. It'd be useful to mention something like Wealthfront list here.
>>. spend a weak reviewing typical algo/data structure questions
There are SO many resources online, that it's very easy to get lost in the search of what's typical, especially if one hasn't interviewed in a few years. It'd be useful to mention to follow some introductory book/resource here.
>> . For the companies that I absolutely want to work for, I review every single glassdoor review and write down the interview questions. Remember, most companies have question banks and most interviewers have favorite questions which results in same questions being asked over an over again. You want to exploit that
For companies with shorter history, this is doable. For companies with longer history of this kind of interviewing, browsing through Glassdoor is very similar to dumpster diving. It's doable, but it's super easy to get discouraged quickly. Not to mention very often people paste questions very vaguely e.g. "got asked a Graphs question", or they paste code which is a nightmare to follow, even if you trust that it's correct.
In other words, note that this phase can take a lot of time to do well.
>>. Then to get over my interviewing jitters, I interview at a few companies where I would absolutely not work at. This results in no pressure interview practise and you can literally laugh at their asinine interview questions and walk out
Again, how does one get interviews at even those companies where they don't want to work at? Getting interviews is as much of a problem, as clearing them. Added to that, there is always this anxiety about rejecting those offers, because there is no guarantee of getting thru the ones you want to work at.
Additionally, when picking practice companies, it's important to pick ones that have a process with similar intensity as your favorite ones. That knowledge is often not mainstream.
>>. Finally, for the companies i actually want to work at, I try my best to get rid of phone screen. This is usually accomplished by dazzling them with my decent size github profile, contributing some fixes to their OSS project or finding someone who already works there that is in my alumni network
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Internal referral is definitely the best way. But majority of people don't have internal warm referrals at most places. Additionally, unless your technical reputation precedes you, most good companies are unlikely to give you a free pass on phone screens. It's extremely rare to have a dazzling Github profile enough to skip a phone screen.
>> Then when you finally arrive for the interview, you have real world interview practise, they are already impressed with your github profile/references and biased toward you versus some random joe off the street and you have made sure you have a pretty high probability of getting a question that you have already seen or is similar to a question you already know.
This again, assumes that everyone in the panel knows about your preceding reputation. And that one doesn't mess up even a single interview.
Overall - please don't get me wrong - this is great advice and much better than getting frustrated without it. What I want to point out, that the inherent fragility of the entire process is so high, that one should be careful pinning one's confidence on any particular strategy. The only thing in your hand, as a candidate, is to prepare and prepare well.