Explain multithreading and locks
Company: TikTok
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: hard
Interview Round: Technical Screen
Explain how multithreading works and when to use locks. Compare mutexes, semaphores, and read–write locks, including their pros/cons and appropriate use cases. Identify race conditions, deadlocks, livelocks, and starvation; outline concrete strategies to avoid them (e.g., lock ordering, timeouts, backoff, minimizing critical sections). Then design and implement a thread-safe bounded queue supporting multiple producers and consumers using condition variables, and describe how you would test it for correctness and performance.
Quick Answer: This interview question evaluates requirements, scale assumptions, API/data design, architecture, trade-offs, failure modes, and rollout in a realistic interview setting. A strong answer for Explain multithreading and locks states assumptions, handles edge cases, explains trade-offs, and shows how to validate the result clearly.