A little bit of disclaimer here before we start digging in a little more: I can barely scratch the surface of how solvers work. The variables were solving for are put into a single list. First round with Hiring Manager and rejected. Ship It Our first run of this new process took place in November 2015. Our team could then use TestTracks browser plugin to preview and QA the new views along the way. Make a feature or two. Iteration doesnt stop at code. I applied online. Engineering the Launch of a New Brand for Betterment In 2017, Betterment set out tolaunch a new brandto better define the voice and feel of our product. Namely, the guarantee of at-least-once execution. By automating detection of these low hanging fruit vulnerabilities, we can free up engineering effort during security reviews and focus on more interesting and complex issues. Whatever the case may be, this shouldnt deter them from collecting data. By knowing that the Coach app is aruby_appwe know how many jobs will need to be run and when. HR screen followed by a technical phone screen and final round. I moved to Nashville to study songwriting and music business, and started a small label through which I released my bands album. Heres how we did it. After spirited internal discussions we landed on a simple principle: We should provide candidates the most natural setting possible to demonstrate their abilities. Microsoft question - Design an old style mobile phone and search for various names based on key press. In this post, well be sharing that journey. But I soon realized it was just the opposite: Knowing less about finance motivated me to learnquickly. A nice property that weve observed at Betterment, and that might apply to you as well, is that the number of jobs tends to scale proportionally with the number of customers and accounts. I highly recommend using it. We cannot just assign arbitrarily large values to the decision variables due to two restrictions which cannot be violated: Joe must maintain $11,000 in his taxable account and $5,500 in his Roth IRA. Each interviewer knows which competencies (e.g., software craftsmanship) to evaluate. There are repos, each repo has one or more projects of any type. Got the first interview in about 3 weeks. It also made visibility easier in terms of sharing and communicating different teams SLO definitions across the org. Our systems are generally stable, and feature development is paramount to business success. The engineering spirit, the drive to craft and build the quality service for our customers that we dream and crave for ourselves, is how Betterment began, and its how well shape the future. Okay brass tacks. model initialization, find calls, etc). It generates a secret-editor role that privileged humans can assume to manage the secrets and an application role for the application to assume at runtime to decrypt the secrets. Ultimately I decided to go with the other company because the team I'll be joining is newly forming and there's an outsized opportunity to have a big impact. Pages are built from a collection of components that are shared across pages, but can be expanded upon or manipulated in the context of the page theyre on. As good companies tend to do, it began growingnot just in terms of users, but in terms of capabilities. Members break out and solve problems together, sharing and honing skills, while building community and support. Complete a pair programming exercise consisting of some starter code and finishing out a key function. How is their IT department for roles like Director or VP? Betterment interview details in New York City, NY: 37 interview questions and 35 interview reviews posted anonymously by Betterment interview candidates. It couldnt scale out to the rest of the org with ease. Again, it combines both DelayedJob and its ActiveRecord backend, and should be more or less compatible with Rails apps that already use ActiveJob or DelayedJob. Moving your organization towards these ideals is likely to be an imperfect and gradual process. To fulfill that promise, we need to deliver the best product and tools available and then improve them indefinitely, which, when you think about it, sounds incredibly ambitious or even foolhardy. The remainder falls on the shoulders of the developer and their peers to be cognizant of the choices they are making when shipping new application controllers. We're always searching for extraordinary people to join our team. As soon as the bug was fixed, we wanted to ensure that we had automated tests to handle a similar issue in the future. We leveraged ActionPack variants built into Rails and feature flags from TestTrack in new ways, ensuring we didnt need to make any architecture changes. The interview was centered around how well you communicate,work with others, and problem solve. Thanks primarily to the simple addition of theLABiometryTypeenum newly available in iOS 11, its easy for our application to determine which biometry feature, if any, is available on a given device. The flag takes a seed that can be one of two things, either a 32 bit unsigned integer or the word random. Download results for local analysis: From S3, we could download the summarized results of each of our simulations for analysis on a "regular" computer. Authorization through Navigability Rule #1: Authorization should happen in the controller and should emerge naturally from table relationships originating from the authenticated user, i.e. And the Betterment engineering team is avoiding the dreaded productivity and happiness suck that happens when working on systems with too much legacy code. I was on the verge of taking another internship in educational technology, commonly referred to as edtech. But when I got the opportunity to work at Betterment, a rapidly growing company, I had to take it. A bonus of Style Closet is how well its able to host these React components since they can simply be incorporated into a view by being wrapped in a Style Closet component. The main recurring issue was that hiring managers were left uncertain as to whether a candidate truly possessed the technical aptitude and skills to justify making them an employment offer. When I started at Betterment (the company) five years ago, Betterment (the platform) was a monolithic Java application. The technical portions were not difficult and didn't need much preparation beyond what I would do normally at work. Testing requires striking a fine balance - we dont want to under-test either. Explaining how we use sopsorific is best done by exploring how our secrets management workflow plays out for each stage of the software development lifecycle. Meanwhile, if our queue existed in a separate datastore, our enqueues will be completely unaware of the transaction, and wed run the risk of enqueuing a job that acts on data that was never committed, or (even worse) wed fail to enqueue a job even when the rest of the transactional data was committed. Screening with HR, Call with hiring manager, case study, 3-4 hours of interview with the team and other members (each 30 minutes). Our analytics and data science team at Betterment uses these data best practicesto quickly produce reliable and sophisticated insights to drive product and business decisions. Accessing the database requires knowledge of SQL, a lot of scripts are written in Python, front end structure and design is written in HTML and CSS, and front end animation is written in javascript. This employer has claimed their Employer Profile and is engaged in the Glassdoor community. Julia solves this issue by making it very simple to take a piece of research code and refactor it for production use. This article is part of Engineering at Betterment. To meet these needs, we created Blazer, an extension of the Backbone router. Every situation is different and if you are unsure what the appropriate test coverage is for a particular feature, start a discussion with your team! We realized that the dependency graph of repository projects project jobs was complicated enough that we would need to recreate the entire.circleci/config.ymlfile whenever we needed to update it, instead of just modifying the YAML file in place. As of July 2016, all full-stack, mobile, and site-reliability engineering roles have adopted this new approach. Sign In. A few simple questions can facilitate effective security review of a PR that touches a controller action: Who is the authenticated user? Easy and comprehensive testing. Well, it was one part versatility of software engineering, one part courage to work in an industry I knew nothing about, and a dash of eagerness to learn as much as I could. We encourage all engineers who want to add to their own CI pipeline to make changes on a branch from ourCoachrepository, where all the configuration generation magic happens, verify its effectiveness for their use-case, and open a pull request. Not quite. Shared code between services creates shared ownership, and shared ownership leads to undesirable coupling. (a1+b1+c1+d1)(.40*totalpounds)>0 (a7+b7+c7+d7)(.05*totalpounds)>0 Note here that I changed the constraints from equal-to to greater-than because comparing floats to be exactly equal is a hard problem when youre multiplying and adding numbers. SLOs should align with business objectives and needs, which will help Product and Engineering Managers understand the direct business impact of engineering efforts. If, for example, our user research says we should aim for 99.5% uptime, thats 3h 21m 36s of downtime available per 28 days. If the service doesnt work as intended, no user (or engineer) will be happy. Was the error budget consumed by real failures? Testing our Rails applications allows us to build features more quickly and confidently by proving that code does what we think it should, catching regression bugs, and serving as documentation for our code. Theres no context to orient us quickly to what the notification is for. Less JavaScript. A controller-level hook allowed us to easily distinguish which views were to display opt-out mode with a single line of code. Airflowqueuesallow us to designate certain tasks to run on particular hardware (e.g. This means that application developers need to consider authorization with every controller we write or change. You might guess that you can express it as follows: The above statements assert that the sum of the balances of VTI across Joes accounts must be equal to half of his total balance. More from Betterment: Server Javascript: A Single-Page App ToA Single-Page App Going to Work at Betterment Engineering at Betterment: Do You Have to Be a Financial Expert? And our platform needed to grow along with it. Im going to walk you through how we got there. chicken:6.000lbs(6.0instock) carrots:0.667lbs(8.0instock) thyme:0.183lbs(19.0instock) onions:0.733lbs(12.0instock) noodles:0.000lbs(0.0instock) garlic:0.000lbs(1.0instock) parsley:0.000lbs(6.0instock) 13.956lbsoffoodfromJerry's. Like all of our tests, this functions both as regression prevention and as documentation of your intent. Anonymous Interview Candidate in New York, NY, The process took 1 week. Our first run of this new process took place in November 2015. I thought my 5 year was going to finally show something but it did not. How to remove legacy code During our portfolio optimization, we had to come up with a framework for dealing with pieces of old code. They accomplished that by hiding the users legal name in a dropdown accordion that is toggled closed by default. Whats so good about making everything thesame? Because this was entry level, experience with specific languages were not required and interviewers were very helpful with syntax as long as you knew what steps were needed to solve the problem. Consider the following controller: So long as a user is authenticated, they can perform the show action on any document (including documents belonging to others!) Our app is one of those apps. Optimal portfolio management requires managing a portfolio in real-time, including taxes, rebalancing, risk, and circumstantial variables like cashflows. When the day of the big reveal arrived, all that would be left to do was toggle the flag to unveil the code wed shipped and tested weeks before. Educate everyone, not just women and minorities: When everyone is aware and discussing inclusion in the workplace, it builds and maintains a great company culture. Next, we find the leftover pennies by taking the inflow minus the total of the integer quotients, which is 123456(38271 + 43209 + 24691 + 17283) = 2. Were running Airflows database on AmazonsRelational Database Serviceand using AmazonsElasticachefor Redis queuing. Also, we are providing the constraints as tuple of dictionaries. In addition, weve consistently received high marks from candidates and interviewers alike, who prefer our revamped approach. Sopsorific uses the term ecosystem to describe this concept, as well as collectively describe a suite of apps that make up a working Betterment system. I interviewed at Betterment in Feb 2021, 3 weeks total, (4 if you make it to final onsite, each interview occured on a separate week) Building on at-least-once guarantees If we know for sure that well fully execute all jobs at least once, then we can write our jobs in such a way that makes the at-least-once approach reliable and resilient to failure. 3. The most obvious alternative was a computer, but then many of our engineers expressed concerns with this method, having had bad experiences with computer-based interviews in the past. A flash message/warning is something you may use throughout your app in different colors and with different text, but you want it to look consistent. Over time, a handful of these teams formed deviating opinions on what kind of acceptance criteria they had for CI. Interviewers were professional throughout. However, in modern versions of Rails, that has changed. From here, we do the things we couldnt do beforepull real parameters out of the requests and feed them back into the fake response to make it more realistic. 1 Betterment Junior Software Engineer interview questions and 1 interview reviews. Additionally, we always deploy multiple baseline Airflow workers in case one fails, in which case we use automated deploys to stand up any part of the Airflow cluster on new hardware. Let's imagine a simple social network app, igrastam, that has an activity feed screen, a profile screen, a flow for updating your profile information, and a flow for posting images. I made the jump to start becoming an engineer. How We Engineered Betterments Tax-Coordinated Portfolio For our latest tax-efficiency feature, Tax Coordination, Betterments solver-based portfolio management system enabled us to manage and test our most complex algorithms. Continuous Delivery (CD) at scale is hard to get right. The minimize function takes this in as a list of tuples where the indices line up with x. It makes communicating with our regulators easier, and is doing so in a pretty impressive fashion. This employer has claimed their Employer Profile and is engaged in the Glassdoor community. From an engineering perspective, this means we needed to enhance the code in our existing trading platform to accommodate dynamic asset allocation, with an eye towards future enhancements in our pipeline. The technical interviews stood out from other on-site experiences because the problems felt "real world" - they were based on actual challenges Betterment's team has had to solve. We still want to maximize our objective function V. However, with the introduction of the drift terms, we want every dollar allocated toward a single fund to incur a penalty if it moves the target balance for that funds asset class below or above its target amount. For example, by assuming that any Java library will run thePMDlinter and unit tests in a certain way we can bootstrap a new repository with very little effort. We want the API provider to own and version their APIs, and we want the API consumer to own their integration with each version of a collaborator service's API. Write characterization tests We also experimented with characterization tests. Here you can see how to construct an instance of the Charlatan class and then use its methods like whenGet to configure it with fake responses that we want to see when we make requests to the configured URLs. In the end, we want to verify the plumbing of user input and business logic output through as few large specs per feature that we can get away with. This blog post discusses the different responsibilities of these types of specs, and other related high level guidelines for specs. Reflecting on Our Engineering Apprenticeship Program Betterment piloted an Apprentice Program to add junior talent to our engineering organization in 2017, and it couldnt have been more successful or rewarding for all of us. If theyre in our codebase, we should be able to iterate on the fakes without having to restart our server; the behavior isnt always right the first time, and restarting is tedious and it's not the Rails Way. Write unit tests for a piece of the method, then refactor that piece. Get started with your Free Employer Profile, The Ultimate Job Interview Preparation Guide. Discussion Finally, weve added an Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) sessionanother idea provided by our Women in Technology group. This also meant that we ended up with an API that fit our exact needs rather than having to reframe our approach to fit what nock was able to offer us. While this will certainly work for this particular example, enforcing that the portfolio allocation is exactly on target when determining optimality turns out to be too restrictive. Any insights would be helpful. Then we can generate a fake for our "trading" collaborator service using rails generate webvalve:fake_service Trading. We built a tool (Coach) to make the way that we build and test code conventional across all of our of apps, regardless of language, application owner, or business unit. It may be surprising then to learn that we actually went with Option 2. What do you think are the biggest trends of our time in this space? Free interview details posted anonymously by Betterment interview candidates. This was essentially a map for us engineers to be able to reference and go update those old usages in our codebase whenever we wanted. Its also ok to assert that the database was changed in some way in a request spec, but like system specs, there is no need for detailed assertions around object state or business logic. Contributing to Rubocop was such a nice experience that when we later found that wed like to add a configuration option to an unrelated cop, we felt great about opening apull requestto do so, which was merged as well. Ruby on Rails developers have the choice of resque, sidekiq, que, good_job, delayed_job, and now delayed, Betterments own flavor of job queue! Alongside this manual testing pain, the automated testing in the existing iOS and android codebases was inconsistent. On Fishbowl, you can share insights and advice anonymously with Betterment employees and get real answers from people on the inside. A Better Way With our new paradigm, we can skip most of this. Williams goal is to help women recognize the characteristic and empower them to overcome it. The GSON/JSON/SQLite testing framework helped the trading team maintain laser focus on their task, as they worked under the hood. As a result, in addition to learning how well a candidate can write code, we learn how well they collaborate. Compile the Julia code into a shared library, and call it directly from Ruby usingFFI. SLOs will ensure that we have a solid understanding of the state of our services in terms of reliability, and they empower us to focus on user happiness. Secrets also define how your application behaves. We decided to allow candidates the choice of using a whiteboard if they wished, but it would no longer be the default method for presenting ones skills. I interviewed at Betterment (New York, NY). Consider these principles, along with our current and future open source work, part of our contribution to that conversation. While we may implement a hot-standby backup in the future, we simply accept it as a known risk and set our monitoring system to notify a team member of any deviances. It must be precise and clear where you got your data, and I dont mean conversationally clear. What does it mean to escapecontent? SLOs in code Now that we have our metrics flowing, our engineers can define SLOs. Below is a test written in Groovy, which sets up fixture data that mimics the exact situation in our Meet Joe example. We still lacked a good way to share markup across all our apps. Thanks to Uncruft, once I generated that initial map of deprecations the large foundational work stream could then be further split into smaller brooks of work that could be tackled by different squads at different times. The parent object of any activity inside the Betterment platform is a user transaction that includes deposits or withdrawals for a goal, dividends, allocation changes, transfer of money between goals and so on. Complete a pair programming exercise consisting of some starter code and finishing out a key function. If we buried the authorization within the model, it would be difficult to ensure that the trust-root chain is being enforced especially if the model is used by multiple controllers that handle authorization inconsistently. Our trans customers got the solution they needed, which makes this work crucial for that fact alonebut because of that, our cis customers also received a feature that delighted them. Throughout the process, we identified several discrepancies between JavaScript and R function outputs, so we regularly reconciled the differences. On-site interview included a 1 hr AMA lunch session which I really enjoyed. This is because code in the body of the main function and the bodies of groups only runs once and it does so immediately. We chose to fake the http client since it is the very edge of our network layer. This gives us a class in a conventional location that inherits from WebValve::FakeService. We use Marionette.js, a framework built on top of Backbone.js, to help us organize our JavaScript and manage page state. Not only does this increase test readability (each set up method will set up only the dependencies needed for the tests below it and within the same scope in the testing tree), but this reduces the scope for potential problems. We try to avoid testing declarations directly in model specs - well talk more about that in a future blog post on testing model behavior, not testing declarations. This new map leads us to our second task: addressing those deprecated usages. The circles represent various asset classes, and the bar shows the allocation for all the accounts, if added together. Interactive elements, some delightful animations, and other frontend behaviors still need it.
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