How to "get good"?

Easier said than done of course, but my advice is to stop constantly worrying about layoffs. Of course, if your company's share price is down 80% and your VP has hinted about job cuts several times, polish up that resume and start applying. But if you don't have concrete signals that layoffs are coming in your organizations, just focus on becoming a better engineer and building up your professional network.

At the end of the day, a tiny fraction of life is stuff we can control and the rest is stuff that's out of our hands. Just focus on hyper-optimizing that small slice you do control, because that's all people like you and I can do as regular engineers.

Here's a good video covering all this in more detail: This Is How You Become A Layoff-Proof Software Engineer

Since you're an Associate Software Engineer, I highly recommend our code quality course if you haven't finished it already: [Course] Level Up Your Code Quality As A Software Engineer

It helps to work on high-impact projects where you are the one driving the project forward. This works in two ways:

1. Your current company will have to take your involvement in the projects into account when determining your performance.
2. If you are looking for opportunities at other companies, you'll need to be very clear about your involvement on the projects you worked on at your current company.

It also helps to be the subject matter expert for a feature or service at your company. You'll be such a valuable asset to the company because the success for that product depends so much on your contribution.