Where Real Leaked Interview Questions Come From [2026]

1. What "Leaked Interview Questions" Actually Means

The word "leaked" is informal shorthand that the tech recruiting community uses for interview questions that candidates shared publicly after completing an interview. It does not mean stolen, hacked, or obtained illegally. It means a real engineer went through a real interview, then posted about their experience on a public forum — the same way you might post a review of a restaurant on Yelp.

Candidate interview reports have been shared publicly on tech forums since at least 2005. By 2015, the practice was so widespread that LeetCode added a dedicated "Discuss" section to their platform specifically to host company-specific interview experience posts. Today, millions of engineers contribute to these platforms annually, making the collective signal enormous.

What makes this data valuable is specificity. When a candidate posts "I interviewed at Google L4, coding round 2, and got this graph problem..." they are giving you signal that no amount of LeetCode grinding can replicate: the exact company, level, round type, difficulty relative to that company's bar, and what the interviewer cared about. That is the data LeakCode aggregates.

See the full database: Google, Meta, Amazon, or browse all interview topics.

2. The History: How Candidate Sharing Became Standard Practice

The tech industry's culture of interview transparency has deep roots. Before specialized forums existed, candidates shared experiences on Usenet groups, early tech forums like Slashdot and Joel on Software's community, and eventually LinkedIn and Glassdoor. The practice accelerated for three reasons:

1. 1

   Asymmetric information — and engineering culture's instinct to fix it

   Companies know exactly what they ask. Candidates arrive blind. Engineers, as a professional class, are culturally predisposed to reduce information asymmetry through documentation and knowledge sharing. Sharing interview experiences is, in this framing, just applied engineering culture.

2. 2

   The rise of LeetCode-style interviews standardized the vocabulary

   When algorithmic interviews became dominant at major tech companies in the 2010s, a shared vocabulary emerged. "I got a medium graph problem" became a meaningful signal that candidates could act on. LeetCode's discuss forum provided the platform to organize this signal at scale.

3. 3

   International candidates needed information advantages

   For international engineers — particularly those on H-1B pipelines or coming from non-Anglophone countries — peer interview intelligence was critical for leveling the informational playing field. Platforms like 1Point3Acres grew specifically to serve this need for Chinese-speaking engineers navigating North American tech hiring.

The major tech companies are fully aware of this ecosystem. They do not pursue legal action against question-sharing platforms. In fact, some companies have been observed using interview question databases to ensure their own question pools do not overlap with publicly known problems — a signal that they view the ecosystem as structurally permanent.

3. The 7 Sources: Where Questions Come From

LeakCode aggregates from 7 verified source platforms. Here is the full breakdown, with actual counts from our live database:

Each source type has distinct characteristics in terms of question specificity, candidate level, and recency distribution. See /sources for the full explanation of how each source is ingested and processed.

4. The 1Point3Acres Advantage: Chinese-Language Signal

1Point3Acres (1p3a.com) is the largest Chinese-language tech career community in North America. Founded in 2009, it has over 10 million registered users — predominantly Chinese-speaking engineers on H-1B and OPT visas navigating FAANG hiring. Its interview experience section contains hundreds of thousands of detailed reports from candidates at every major tech company.

Most English-speaking researchers and candidates never access 1p3a because the content is in Chinese. This creates a significant information asymmetry: Chinese-speaking candidates have access to vastly more pre-interview signal than English-speaking candidates at the same companies. LeakCode closes this gap by running automated translation pipelines that convert 1p3a reports into English and index them alongside English-language sources.

The value of 1p3a data specifically: (1) it has a disproportionate share of recent reports because the community is highly active, (2) Chinese-speaking engineers disproportionately represent FAANG employees, making their interview experiences particularly dense with signal, and (3) 1p3a reports tend to be more detailed than typical Reddit or LeetCode posts, often including the full problem statement with constraints.

LeakCode has 5,710+ translated 1p3a reports in the database — the third-largest source by volume, and the single best source for highly specific recent FAANG interview questions. This is a competitive advantage no English-language-only database has.

5. Is It Legal? The Honest Answer

Yes, with nuance. The legality of sharing interview questions depends on two things: whether the candidate signed an NDA covering interview questions, and the jurisdiction's treatment of trade secrets.

NDAs in Tech Recruiting

Most tech company recruiting NDAs cover confidential business information, proprietary code, and internal strategy documents — not interview questions. A coding problem about graph traversal is not a trade secret. Candidates are generally not bound by NDA terms that would prevent them from describing the type of problem they were asked, and the major tech companies have not pursued legal action against interview question sharing platforms that operate on public candidate reports.

Note: some companies (particularly hedge funds and quant firms) use NDAs that explicitly cover interview questions. Candidates at Jane Street, Citadel, or D.E. Shaw may have signed NDAs with broader coverage. LeakCode does not include questions from these firms where report sourcing is ambiguous.

Trade Secret Doctrine

For a question to be protected as a trade secret, it must derive economic value from being secret and be the subject of reasonable efforts to maintain its secrecy. Tech interview questions that are routinely discussed on public forums — sometimes by the companies' own employees — do not meet this standard. When Google's own engineering blog references the type of problems asked in interviews, the secrecy element is waived.

Practical Reality: 15 Years of Public Practice

LeetCode's discuss forum, Reddit's r/cscareerquestions, Glassdoor's interview section, and 1Point3Acres have operated interview question communities for over 15 years without major legal challenge from FAANG companies. Glassdoor in particular hosts millions of company-specific interview reports and has not faced broad legal action from the companies covered.

LeakCode aggregates publicly posted content. We do not solicit confidential information, we do not pay candidates for reports, and we do not publish content that was posted in private or members-only forums. Every source in our database is publicly accessible. See /methodology for the full sourcing policy.

6. How LeakCode Verifies Authenticity

The biggest problem with interview question databases is fabrication and noise. A resource that lists AI-generated "likely interview questions" or recycled generic LeetCode problems with company labels attached is worse than useless — it trains candidates on wrong signal. Here is how LeakCode ensures authenticity:

Full methodology details at /methodology.

7. What the Database Looks Like: Numbers and Coverage

Here are the actual numbers from LeakCode's live database, verified as of 2026:

Coverage is not uniform across companies. FAANG companies (Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Netflix), plus Microsoft, Stripe, Uber, Airbnb, Bloomberg, and other high-volume interview targets are represented by hundreds to thousands of reports each. Smaller companies may have 10-50 reports. Coverage scales directly with how much that company's candidates post on public forums.

Round type coverage: coding rounds are the most common report type. System design is well-represented for senior-level questions. Behavioral questions are underrepresented relative to their importance in actual interviews — because candidates discuss behavioral questions less precisely in public posts. OA questions are well-covered for the major platforms (Amazon HackerRank, Meta CodeSignal, Google proprietary).

Browse by company at /browse. Browse by topic at /topics/. Top company hubs: Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple.

8. Recent Additions: 2025-2026 Reports

The questions below were added from candidate reports in 2025 and 2026. These are the freshest signals in the database — reported by engineers who recently completed interviews at major tech companies.

The database grows continuously as candidates post new reports. Spring and fall hiring seasons (Feb-May and Aug-Nov) produce the highest new report volumes. Subscribe to get notified of new reports for your target companies.

9. How to Use This Database Effectively

LeakCode is most valuable when you use the source specificity — not just as a question list, but as a window into what a specific company actually asks in specific round types. Here is how to extract maximum value:

1. 1

   Start with your target company, sorted by frequency

   Go to /company/{company} and sort by frequency. The top questions have been reported multiple times by independent candidates — they are the most reliable signal of what the company repeatedly asks.

2. 2

   Filter by round type to match your prep stage

   Use round type filtering: OA prep, phone screen, onsite coding, system design, behavioral. Do not mix signal — OA prep and onsite prep require different approaches and different question difficulty targets.

3. 3

   Read full thread content, not just question titles

   The thread body contains the signal that question titles miss: what follow-ups were asked, how the interviewer responded to different approaches, what the candidate was expected to optimize to. This depth of context is what makes verified candidate reports superior to LeetCode problem lists.

4. 4

   Use topic hubs to drill patterns across companies

   If your target company asks a lot of graph problems, go to /topic/graph and drill all verified graph questions across companies — not just your target company. The pattern is what matters, and seeing how different companies frame the same pattern helps you internalize it more deeply.

5. 5

   Sort by recency close to your interview date

   Companies refresh their question pools. A question asked 200 times in 2022 might have been retired. Sort by interview year and focus on 2025-2026 reports when you are 2-4 weeks out from your target interview. Recency signal is the most perishable and most valuable.

10. Frequently Asked Questions