I used to skip "easy" problems. that was the dumbest decision in my entire prep.

somewhere around problem 50 I decided easy problems were beneath me. i had medium and hard tagged in my filters permanently and easy felt like a waste of my limited daily time. looking back that mindset cost me more than it saved.

the wake up call came during a phone screen. first question, technically rated easy, something about merging two sorted structures. i overcomplicated it instantly. started reaching for techniques meant for much harder problems because some part of my brain refused to believe an interviewer would ask something "easy." i was pattern matching to difficulty level instead of just reading the actual problem in front of me.

that's when it clicked that easy problems aren't there to test if you can solve them. they're there to test if you can recognize simplicity without overthinking it. that's an entirely different skill from raw problem solving and i had never trained it.

i went back and redid 40 easy problems i had originally skipped, except this time i timed myself and forced a 3-5 minute cap. the goal wasn't learning new patterns, it was building the instinct to see the simplest path first before my brain jumps to anything fancy.

two phone screens later i got a "two sum" style warmup question and solved it in under 90 seconds, clean, no hesitation. the interviewer's exact words were "okay good, let's move to the real question." that confidence boost going into the harder question mattered more than i expected.

if you're skipping easy problems because they feel like a waste of time, you might be training the wrong muscle. speed and clarity on simple things buys you mental bandwidth for the questions that actually matter.