Java Interviewer tried to break me with a race condition. Spoiler: I got the job | by Shanvika Devi | November 2025

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I was sitting on a zoom call, sweating like a chocolate bar in the Chennai heat. This was my third round in a Java interview. I managed the MCQ round, answered the Spring Boot question, and then the interviewer said something that still haunts my nightmares:

“Okay, I’ll share some code. It contains a multithreaded bug. Fix it.”

Like that.

No allusions.
No direction.
No time to Google “what is a race condition?” »

And this wasn’t a typical LeetCode trick. This was real Java code. Executable interface, shared resources, many threads and a small error causing chaos.

That’s when I knew this was the moment that would decide my offer.

So here’s exactly what happened. How I didn’t panic. How I debugged it. And how you can use the same approach to win your next Java interview, especially when they throw a multithreaded curve.

The bug that started it all

The interviewer shared this code in Google Docs: