Multithreading vs. Callbacks — Experience and Trade-offs

Context

You are interviewing for a Software Engineer technical screen. The interviewer asks you to compare concurrency models and explain when you would use each.

Prompt

1. State which model you are more familiar with (multithreading or callbacks/async) and briefly describe your experience (languages, frameworks, typical workloads).
2. Compare the trade-offs between multithreading and callbacks for:
   • I/O-bound workloads (e.g., network, disk, database calls)
   • CPU-bound workloads (e.g., computation, encoding, image processing)
3. Explain when you would choose one approach over the other, with concise examples.
4. Mention key pitfalls and how you mitigate them.