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by guessmyname 3561 days ago
Last week I was in an interview with Amazon for a position in their web development team. One of the questions was related to this, they asked me to describe how to create the layout for a web page with two columns, I immediately thought about Flexbox but decided to describe the code using "float: (left|right)" and box-sizing, I felt that the two interviewers didn't like my answer because it is outdated.
3 comments

Honestly that sounds like a case where you could improve your interview technique (or perhaps the interviewers could have done better on drilling down into your thinking). The fact you considered multiple options, evaluated them mentally and decided to describe the approach that would have highest compatibility is great, and explaining your thinking to the interviewers could have helped.
I can't find the source right now, but I've read that flexbox for page layout can still be problematic because a lot of times when you use flexbox it'll rely on the content inside of it to determine its flex width. So you'll get a bunch of page reflows while content is being loaded, which is less than ideal.
I feel the interviewers didn't do their part in that exchange considering there are multiple valid ways of completing that task. As an interviewer I would have followed up with saying that method is not allowed for some made up reason, what's another way to do it?