You may need to get better, but you can probably make do with a business translator.
"Expert" => "Reasonably competent."
"Ninja" => "Reasonably competent."
"Excellence" => "Reasonable competence."
"Exceed my expectations" => "Not be a drooling moron."
The scale of competency of programmers runs from
1. If you give them a task, they'll pretend to know how to do it and then produce nothing at all, while trying to keep the fiction up as long as possible. [DailyWTF candidates.]
2. If you give them a task, they'll produce something eventually, but it'll be complete shit and require a lot of further work before it can be used at all. [Indians.]
3. If you give them a task, they'll produce something that sort of works for you. Apply buzzword methodologies to distribute tasks over more of them, to have more done in the same time. Give them more time if you want a better product, repeat until product is good enough. [Reasonably competent programmers. The best anyone can hope for, and all that your interviewers are really selecting for.]
4. You work directly with them to produce a task, you supplying business information and they supplying technical information, and then they produce it, and it's awesome. Sometimes they come to you with a new thing that you realize you can find a business use for. [Experts.]