You've solved 200 problems. Mediums you've already seen take fifteen minutes. The next one you haven't seen freezes you cold inside of five. And every time you ask yourself if you're ready for a FAANG loop, the honest answer is "I don't know." The "I don't know" isn't a feeling problem. It's that you've been asking a feelings question about a performance outcome. TL;DR Self assessed readiness is unreliable because confidence swings with every session. Solving a familiar problem and constructing a solution to a novel one are different skills. The fix is a measurable test: an unseen medium in a pattern family you've studied, under timed conditions, with a hard cap on execution attempts. Pass three of those across three different families and you likely have the level of transfer real interviews actually reward. Fail one and you know exactly where to work. The signal isn't the count. It's whether the recognition holds when the problem name is hidden.…