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Anyone else feel like a fraud even after solving 200+ problems? — CareerVerse

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Anyone else feel like a fraud even after solving 200+ problems?

Anonymous09 Jul 2026

I've been grinding for about 4 months now and I'm past 200 problems on the tracker here, but every time I open a new medium I blank out for the first 10 minutes and feel like I've learned nothing. Then I peek at the editorial and it's something I 'should' have known cold.

Is this just how it is until it clicks, or am I doing something wrong in how I study? Would honestly love to hear from people who pushed through this phase.

8 replies

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Anonymous18 Jul 2026
Solving problems and feeling competent are weirdly unrelated. The count doesn't fix the feeling. Shipping something real that other people actually use is what moved the needle for me, numbers are a trap for this specific anxiety.
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Anonymous14 Jul 2026
Reading the whole thread, the pattern I notice is that everyone here has solved a ton and still feels it — which kind of tells you the feeling isn't tracking your actual ability at all. It's a calibration bug, not a skill gap. The people who genuinely can't do the work almost never lie awake worrying that they can't. Solving problem 201 won't fix it; noticing that gap between what you can do and how you feel is what actually helps.
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Anonymous13 Jul 2026
200+ problems in and still feeling like a fraud is almost a rite of passage, weirdly. What helped me reframe it: solving problems measures one narrow skill, and the "I don't really know anything" feeling is usually just you comparing your messy inside to everyone else's polished outside. The people you assume have it all figured out are quietly feeling the exact same thing. It doesn't fully vanish — you just get better at working alongside it.
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Anonymous12 Jul 2026
The reframe that finally helped me: impostor syndrome is comparing your inside (every doubt and gap you're painfully aware of) to everyone else's outside (their polished, finished work). Everyone's running the same anxious monologue, they just don't post it. 200 problems in, you're not a fraud — you just have an unusually detailed map of what you don't know yet.
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Anonymous12 Jul 2026
Solving 200 problems and still feeling like a fraud is honestly the universal experience — the feeling seems to scale with your skill, which is a cruel joke. The people who feel totally confident are usually the ones who should worry. You're fine; you're just paying attention.
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Anonymous11 Jul 2026
The imposter feeling doesn't scale down with problem count, unfortunately — I know people 5 years in who still feel it. What helped me was tracking 'things I couldn't do 3 months ago that are easy now.' You've solved 200 problems; past-you would be stunned by present-you. The feeling lies, the log doesn't.
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Anonymous10 Jul 2026
Honestly the "fraud" feeling never fully went away for me — it just kept attaching itself to bigger things. Solved 200 → "but can I do it in a real interview." Got the job → "but can I do it at work." At some point I decided the feeling isn't evidence of anything, it's just the sensation of doing something genuinely hard. 200+ problems is not what a fraud does.
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Anonymous09 Jul 2026
Been exactly here. The thing nobody tells you is that blanking for 10 min on a new medium isn't really a knowledge gap, it's a pattern-recognition gap — and that only comes from re-doing problems, not doing new ones. Once I started re-solving the same problem 2-3 days later from a blank editor, the "I should've known this" feeling faded a lot. You're probably further along than it feels.
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