Concurrency and multi threading interview questions

Oracle
zyxw

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zyxw
Dec 13, 2018 22 Comments

How do you guys practice or prepare for multi threading and concurrency related questions asked in interviews. To be more specific, I am talking about questions like those asked for pure storage interviews, confluent.io interviews etc. Not theoretical questions like difference between mutex and semaphores, but questions where they give you a problem that needs to be solved using a asynchronous and multi threaded approach. These might be judged by how are deadlocks avoided, how do you do figure out the minimal part of the code that requires co-ordination among threads, do you use muted or semaphores or conditional variables to solve problems etc?

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 TOP 22 Comments
  • Amazon
    IAmFrugal

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    IAmFrugal
    They ask only algorithms and system design. No one goes into details of concurrency primitives or libraries
    Dec 13, 2018 2
  • Gusto
    u83r

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    u83r
    I interviewed at many companies including FANGs, and only Dropbox asked this stuff
    Dec 13, 2018 4
    • Intel
      time2gtfo

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      time2gtfo
      Did you have to use write code using actual APIs or was pseudo code acceptable for the multi threading portion of it?
      Dec 14, 2018
    • Gusto
      u83r

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      u83r
      Actual APIs, although I don’t think the interviewer would have known either way, since I was using a language he didn’t know well
      Dec 14, 2018
  • Oracle
    zyxw

    Go to company page Oracle

    zyxw
    OP
    Well I have been asked multi threading questions. I will give an example : How do u design a alarm callback system? It can take a callback function and a time after which to call this function. Your system has to keep track of everything and do this in a timely and performant manner. I was able to solve this question using mutex and conditional variables. But this is an interesting question, and I realized there are quite a few companies that ask questions like these for backend and hardcore distributed systems work.
    Dec 13, 2018 3
    • ^beeeeep! Next.
      Dec 13, 2018
    • Intuit
      tczT61

      Go to company page Intuit

      tczT61
      @zyxw I was trying to understand and practice this problem " How do u design a alarm callback system? It can take a callback function and a time after which to call this function"
      How did you kept track of time? anything in java. Any help appreciated.
      Aug 13, 2019
  • Amazon
    haha.

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    haha.
    Did anyone find out what kind of questions are asked for concurrency and multi threading and any prep material ?
    May 25, 2021 0
  • Intuit
    tczT61

    Go to company page Intuit

    tczT61
    Hey Oracle,

    Did you find any source for this? I've something coming up for "multi threading and concurrency related " system design questions and want to practice. Any tips will be helpful.

    Thanks
    Jul 18, 2019 0