1Point3Acres Explained: The Chinese Interview Forum Every Western Candidate Is Missing
There is a forum with thousands of real FAANG interview reports that most English-speaking candidates have never heard of. LeakCode pulls from it. Here is what it is, why it matters, and what the data shows.
If you have ever prepped for a Google or Amazon interview, you have probably searched LeetCode Discuss, browsed Reddit, maybe paid for a premium prep course. But there is a data source that almost no English-speaking candidate knows exists, and it is one of the richest repositories of real interview reports available anywhere.
It is called 1Point3Acres (一亩三分地, literally "one acre and three parts of land" — a Chinese idiom for a person's small corner of the world). LeakCode aggregates from it. This post explains what it is, why it has been invisible to most Western candidates, and what the 3,553 questions we have indexed from it actually show.
What is 1Point3Acres?
1Point3Acres is a Chinese-language community forum founded in 2010, originally for Chinese students studying abroad in the United States. Over time it became the de facto home for Chinese engineers navigating the U.S. tech job market. Today it hosts immigration guides, school rankings, offer comparisons, salary data, and most relevantly: a massive database of interview experience reports.
The interview section works similarly to LeetCode Discuss or Glassdoor. Candidates post after their interviews, describing the round structure, the questions they were asked, and whether they got an offer. The posts are written in Mandarin Chinese. The volume is significant: the forum has been active for 15 years, and the interview section has accumulated tens of thousands of entries covering every major tech employer.
There is a second product within the 1Point3Acres ecosystem: an OJ (Online Judge) catalog that maps LeetCode problem numbers to specific companies. This is crowd-sourced data tracking which LeetCode problems have appeared in which company's coding rounds, tagged by the candidates who faced them.
Why most Western candidates have never heard of it
Three barriers keep 1Point3Acres invisible to the average English-speaking candidate.
Language. The forum is almost entirely in Mandarin. English-speaking engineers do not stumble across it in Google searches, and even if they did, most cannot read the content.
Paywall. Full access to the interview database requires a paid membership. The premium tier unlocks detailed question reports and the OJ catalog. Free access shows limited previews.
Network effects. The forum spread through Chinese student WeChat groups and university circles. If you were not part of those networks when you were job-searching, you likely never heard anyone mention it.
The result is that Chinese-speaking candidates, particularly those who came to the U.S. for graduate school, have had access to a substantially richer set of real interview data than their English-speaking peers. This is not a minor edge. A candidate walking into an Amazon SDE2 loop knowing the specific coding problems that appeared in that role's last 12 months of interviews is operating with meaningfully different information.
How LeakCode processes 1Point3Acres data
LeakCode's pipeline accesses both the 1Point3Acres interview forum and the OJ catalog. The OJ catalog data is structured: it maps LeetCode problem numbers to company identifiers with crowd-sourced tags. We pull those mappings, resolve them against our internal company table, and index the result.
The interview forum data requires more processing. Posts are in Chinese, so we run them through a translation step before classification. We extract the round type (OA, phone screen, virtual onsite, in-person), the problem descriptions, and the company. We then apply the same deduplication and junk-filtering we use across all sources before loading into the LeakCode database.
You can see exactly which sources LeakCode indexes on the sources page. The how it works page walks through the full pipeline.
The numbers: 3,553 questions from the 1p3a OJ catalog
As of May 2026, LeakCode has indexed 3,553 questions from the 1Point3Acres OJ catalog specifically. These are distinct from the main 1p3a interview forum posts, which contribute an additional 1,289 entries. Combined, the 1Point3Acres ecosystem contributes 4,842 questions to the LeakCode database.
| Source | Questions | Share of DB |
|---|---|---|
| 1p3a OJ Catalog | 3,553 | 10.8% |
| 1p3a Interview Forum | 1,289 | 3.9% |
| 1Point3Acres Total | 4,842 | 14.7% |
14.7% of the LeakCode database would not exist without 1Point3Acres. For some companies that are popular hiring targets within Chinese-speaking networks, the 1p3a-sourced entries represent an even larger share of the available data.
Which companies benefit most from 1p3a data?
The 1Point3Acres community has historically skewed toward candidates targeting the most competitive U.S. tech employers: Google, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Apple, and the top unicorns. These are the companies that attracted the most Chinese graduate students during the H-1B era, and the forum's coverage reflects that.
In the LeakCode database, the 1p3a sources contribute data across all major companies, but the coverage is densest for FAANG and FAANG-adjacent companies. If you are prepping for an interview at Google, Amazon, or Meta, the 1p3a-sourced questions are likely adding signal that no other English-language source provides.
Why this matters for your prep
The practical implication is straightforward: if you are preparing for a competitive tech interview using only English-language sources, you are seeing a subset of the available data. LeetCode Discuss, Reddit, and Glassdoor are excellent. But they miss candidates who reported exclusively on 1Point3Acres.
That gap is what LeakCode exists to close. The database aggregates all seven sources into a single queryable index. When you browse questions for a company on LeakCode, the results include 1p3a-sourced entries alongside everything from LeetCode Discuss, GeeksforGeeks, Reddit, InterviewDB, and Blind. You do not need to read Chinese or pay for a 1Point3Acres membership to access that signal.
You can see how LeakCode compares to browsing 1Point3Acres directly on the LeakCode vs 1Point3Acres comparison page.
The broader pattern: fragmented data, concentrated advantage
1Point3Acres is not unique in being invisible to part of the candidate pool. Blind skews toward current employees and is heavily indexed by senior engineers. Reddit's interview experiences are scattered across dozens of subreddits. LeetCode Discuss requires knowing which company tag to search. GeeksforGeeks covers older interview patterns that skew academic.
Each source has its own coverage biases, its own access barriers, and its own network effects. Candidates who know all seven sources and use them all are working with a materially different information set than candidates who only know one or two.
The goal of LeakCode is to flatten that advantage. All sources, one database. The full picture available to anyone who wants it, at a price point lower than a single prep book. See the sources breakdown and the live stats page for current counts.