Instead, each worker acts independently. There are repos, each repo has one or more projects of any type. It's clever and great. Just keep an eye on it. My advice to candidates, interview with them but dont keep all your eggs in one basket. They showed me how we were getting quite a few requests from trans customers to quit deadnaming them. They can define what is called an aspirational SLO - basically an SLO for an important component in their system - to start collecting data over time. Performance Review Generator Create a peer to peer review using performance evaluation phrases. I moved to New York after getting an opportunity at Sony and worked for a year producing video content. Engineering at Betterment: Do You Have to Be a Financial Expert? While this approach enabled us to reuse our existing R code, it also introduced lag and server performance concerns. So the string option was appealing to us, but that workflow didnt have the best editing experience as it required multiple steps in order to encrypt a value, insert it into the correct file, and then export it into the environment like the12-factor appmethodology tells us we should. When reviewing code, I look for adherence to coding standards, code efficiency, readability, and maintainability. For example, they think theyre frauds, or unqualified for their jobs, regardless of their achievements. All technical questions was real world scenarios that a production systems face, they drilled me pretty good on algo, database design, usage, architecture designs, real world questions, not some random questions from EPI. Interview with other companies simultaneously. Engineering the Trading Platform: Inside Betterments Portfolio Optimization To complete the portfolio optimization, Betterment engineers needed enhance the code in our existing trading platform. A component is a reusable code building block. We used to use controller specs instead of request specs. Weve also covered how our custom cops can help developers avoid antipatterns, resulting in safer and easier to read code. We also streamlined our question-asking process and hiring timeline, and added an opportunity for candidates to speak with non-interviewers. On the other hand, some methods are just a means for us to mark content as already safe. The Soup Nazi should only buy a total of 40 lbs worth ingredients because Elaine, George, Jerry, and Newman just dont have enough chicken. At Betterment, staying compliant with regulators, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, is a part of everyday life. dropping a database column that no longer makes sense in the current code structure), it's safe to assume that there will be data issues that will consume a significant portion of developer time, especially with older data. Similarly, even our authorized endpoints never allow one user to peer into another users object graph. Perhaps they can set goals around "Bug Tracker Inbox Zero" or "Failed Background Jobs Zero" within a certain time frame, a week or a month for example. In doing all of these things, weve reduced bottlenecks for developers so they can focus more on shipping features and less on managing secrets. Julia is a newer language that looked like a perfect fit for the investing team for a number of reasons: Speed. New York City: $190,000 - $205,000. Theyre an alternative to the kind of high-level systems integration tests that would include a critical mass of components that would render the test slow and non-repeatable. If youre interested in hearing me say even more about resilient data persistence and job execution, feel free to check out Can I break this?, a talk I gave at RailsConf 2021! In our updated portfolio, the number of possible transactions types did not change. 23 Betterment Software Engineer interview questions and 17 interview reviews. In the spirit of open-source software, we are sharing Blazer with the community. For more information about working at Betterment, please visit our Careers page. In order to help these engineers, we provided guidelines around where it was necessary to use a legal first name, but in general we pushed to use a customers preferred first name wherever possible. 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. R and Python both have great tools to produce finished reports as static HTML or PDF documents, or even interactive reporting and visualization products. See full disclosure for our estimates and Tax Coordination in general. In this example, we are trying to maximize the number of pounds of ingredients he can buy because that will result in the most soup. Either the code is poorly designed, the code has no tests around it to specify its behavior, or both. All it took was 1 week. That might include a single happy-path test apiece for features like log-in and sign-up. Do no harm to others' work At Betterment, we are constantly pushing through new features and enhancements, some visible to customers, but many not. Free interview details posted anonymously by Betterment interview candidates. But so is reliability and performance. I applied online. 25 Citrus Informatics Engineering - Software & QA Department Reviews by current and past employees about salary & benefits work culture skill development career growth job security work-life balance and more. In practice, that might look something like this: Resulting in a function for which the fact that the underlying implementation is in Julia has been completely abstracted away: Challenges & Pitfalls Debugging an FFI integration can be challenging; any misconfiguration is likely to result in the dreadedsegmentation faultthe cause of which can be difficult to hunt down. 1) Phone screen about the company We think that our Web app will be just as pleasant to use, and we can more quickly enhance and build new features going forward. While optimizing for code reuse is generally desirable, rewriting our financial models in JavaScript benefited the product in two noticeable ways: It increased testing and organizational understanding. At the same time, requiring a lot of mocks is generally a sign that the method under test either is doing too many different things, or the model is too highly coupled to other models in the codebase. I started reading Robert Shillers Finance and the Good Society, a book my dad recommended to me months earlier. Its been an incredible journey, so I sat down with them to hear first hand about their experiences. 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. straightforward interview process, the Betterment apprenticeship quickly . Were able to write tests specific to the component without worrying about the use-case or increasing testing time for our apps. All products, services, and content obtained from a linked website are provided as is without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including, but not limited to, implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, non-infringement, security, or accuracy. IMHO, Betterment hiring process is best in the business. But we did things a little differently, which saved us thousands of computing hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Key handling and authorization policy design is tricky to get right and sops doesnt do it all for us. Or they can define some SLOs around types of on-call tasks that their team tackles each week. Come work side-by-side with our team, laptops open, and solve problems together. All teams at Betterment are responsible for teasing apart complex financial concepts and then presenting them in a coherent manner, enabling our customers to make informed financial decisions. The input data was serialized and automatically fed back into our test fixtures. Prior to Betterment, I only had experience with super small codebases that I built myself or with friends. Betterment is an engineering-driven company that has developed the most-trusted online financial advisor based on the principles of optimization and efficiency. Instead of multiple interviewers asking a candidate about the same questions based on their resum, we prescribe topics based on the most important core competencies of successful (Betterment) engineers. We use the uri package to support matching templated URLs rather than requiring developers to pass in exactly matching strings for requests their tests will make. Be the first to find this interview helpful. We considered two approaches: (1) Run the existing R code directly server-side, or (2) port our R code to JavaScript to integrate it into our Web application. They look just like widget tests (because they are just widget tests) but they boot up our whole app, run all the real initialization code, and rely on all our real injected dependencies with a few key exceptions (more on that next). To facilitate versioning and sharing of our Julia packages internally (e.g. And these job execution guarantees arent the only area where a background queue might fail to be resilient. Defining the Interface In order to generate the.circleci/config.ymlthat details which jobs to run and what code to execute we first needed to determine what our acceptance criteria was. Byteboard. Heres a simplified version of our upstart configuration. Additionally, in CircleCI where we can easily parallelize our test suites, we realized we wouldnt want to notify someone for every chunk of the test suite that failed, just the first time a failure happened for the suite. We decided to create that large file by ostensibly concatenating smaller components together. Well, we aim to find an affordable, maintainable spot on that testing spectrum a la Justin Searls' advice. We leverage tools like Rubocop and Brakeman, a static analysis tool specifically focused on security, to make our software safe by default against many of the most common security errors, even for code we havent written yet. For me, simple questions bring to mind this interesting concept called The Illusion Of Explanatory Depth, which is when people feel they understand complex phenomena with far greater precision, coherence, and depth than they really do. Simple questions tend to shed light on subjects shrouded in this illusion and force you to confront your lack of knowledge. The SLO is the target percentage, 99.9%. This would entail a lot of code changes, however, as an engineering team we believe deeply in carving up big endeavors into small pieces. They also give background on the role and team structure. Tooling and libraries for processing dart test output into dev-friendly formats. One of these things was having an opinionated tool to help us manage secrets helped to make sure we didnt accidentally leave around low-entropy secrets from when we were developing or testing out a feature. We believe in a world where shipping code, even in really large codebases with lots of contributors, should be done dozens of times a day. This freedom from legacy stylesheets and markup were critical to building and clearly demonstrating the new brand and value proposition we wanted to demonstrate to the world. This allows the view to be reusable. When I sat down with them to solicit feedback on our entire hiring process, they pointed to the whiteboard problem-solving dynamics (one to two engineers sitting, observing, and judging the candidate standing at a whiteboard) as unnatural and awkward. One tech phone screen, 5 hrs on site with other team leads, hiring manager, CTO, and a follow-up 2hrs onsite tech interview, offer was made. Through dependency injection, the new generator is included among the set of generators used to generate constraints. This simple question from our trans customers Can you quit deadnaming me? was a sign that our original understanding of our customers' names was not quite right, and we were lacking knowledge around how names are commonly used. 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. How did I go from creating avatars with Pikachu ears to improving detection of financial criminals? We achieved the same UX wins as a single page app with a fraction of the code. Striving for Simplicity At Betterment, we aim to build products that help our customers reach their financial goals. So, we decided that we really only want to write these flutter_driver end-to-end tests for a tiny subset of our features, almost like a "smoke testing" suite that would signal us if something was seriously wrong with our app. Anonymous Interview Candidate in Columbia, MD, I applied online. As we transitioned to flutter, we made unit/screen testing and code testability a high priority, pushing for thorough coverage. Our goal was to replace the old way of building and testing our applications (what we called the Old World) and start fresh with these principles in mind (what we deemed the New World). To implement this pattern, we use AmazonS3as a persistent storage tier. Lets walk through this process for our example: Remember that were working in cents, so our inflow is 123456 and we need to allocate it across bucket weights of [31000, 35000, 20000, 14000]. What we ended up with was a black box Allocator module, with a public module function to which you could pass 2 arguments: an inflow, and an array of weightings. It failed for a specific GitHub branch(what-to-say-when-things-fail-branch),ina specific repo(Betterment/coach),for a specific PR(#430),for aspecific job in the test suite (coach_clilint (Gemfile)). In 2012, I graduated from the University of Portland with a degree in computer science and promptly moved to the Bay Area. It was clear this part of the interviewing process needed to go. I was able to build my dashboards as a Web app, so I not only needed to understand this structure, but I needed to implement it as well. The CLI reads a small project-level configuration definition file (coach.yml) located in a projects directory and extrapolates information to create the much larger repo-level CircleCI specific configuration file (.circleci/config.yml), which we were previously editing ourselves. 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. Conclusion The path to building a highly available data processing service was not straightforward, requiring us to build a few specific but critical additions to Airflow. The second of these issues was that the cop prevented usages ofrawandhtmlsafe, but did not prevent usages ofsafeconcat. Business intelligence tooling has traditionally been something that comes at a great upfront cost to an organization (it can reach into the millions of dollars)but as a startup, we instead looked carefully at how we could leverage our homegrown talent and resources to build a team to seamlessly integrate into the existing company architecture. Static analysis can help not only with finding existing instances of these vulnerabilities, but also prevent new ones from being introduced. There are a few major wins here: Unifying our business logic. Coding challenge and Sys design. By harnessing the power of Amazon Web Services (specifically EC2 and S3) and a cloud-based message queue called IronMQ we reduced that testing time to just six hoursand for a total cost of less than $500. This question can help the interviewer determine if you have the skills necessary to succeed in this role. I got a very upbeat and cheery sounding email to schedule the call, and my heart was pounding as I waited, and then I was met with a rejection. Phone screen is super basic, technical wasn't hard, but you need to solve the problem at hand. We talked about my career and what I was looking for. 2 hr ByteBoard interview - 40 min design and algorithms (know your standard data structures and algorithms), 70 mins implementing some methods Your answer should include a step-by-step process for designing a back-end system, including any tools or software you might use during the process. Or perhaps the users for a service are Betterment engineers, and its really unclear how that work affects the people who use our companys products. provided they know or can guess its ID - not great! Easy right? Additionally, all components can take a block, which is typically the content for the component. A PR build failed. These represent integer ranges (entirely orthogonal to queues), and default to interactive (0-9), user visible (10-19), eventual (20-29), and reporting (30+), with default alerting thresholds focused on retry attempts and runtime. Rolling your own cryptoisnt a great idea. Not quite. Everyone was very open about what they thought about the company and about what their experience at the company was like. What are the principles that your team share? without the complication of a service boundary). We believe this is important so that we can quickly tell which secrets an app is dependent on just by opening the file. The team uses R to rapidly prototype financial simulations and visualize the results, taking advantage of Rs built-in statistical functions and broad set of pre-built packages. Betterment, I like your company and I will continue using your products, but your onsite interview isn't a test of tech skills, it's a test of Ruby knowledge. Felt as if it was waste of my valuable time, not just with the interviews but for case study as well. Easy and comprehensive testing. Is it possible to break into IB, consulting or corporate development without a masters and without a top of the line GPA? We leveraged ActionPack variants built into Rails and feature flags from TestTrack in new ways, ensuring we didnt need to make any architecture changes. Over time, a handful of these teams formed deviating opinions on what kind of acceptance criteria they had for CI. I work on a real-time customer data platform called the Adobe Experience Platform (AEP . Sheesh, thats a mouthful. Explain previous projects To use a Seinfield analogy, the decisions we would make for Jerry had an effect on what the best decisions were for Elaine. To learn more, we encourage you to watch the below video featuring Betterments Sam Moore, a lead engineer, who reveals the new framework at a Meetup in Betterments NYC offices. Combined together we call this aproject_type. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ 1 file inspected, 1 offense detected The model initialization was flagged because it was seen using create_params, which contains user input. Reproducible also means efficient. Thats a lot of time we can reasonably not react to failures. Phone interview was a typical phone screening some personal questions to make sure your experience matches the role. Total of 6 interviews (phone and in person) Different properties may be provided by a different entity with different marketing standards. This means that an engineer implementing a change to the model would only need to worry about implementing algorithmic behavior, and not about how to retrieve the data needed to do that. Weve started an internal roundtable to voice our concerns about gender inequality in the workplace, weve sponsored and hosted Women in Tech meetups, and were starting to collaborate with other companies to bring awareness to the issue. Secrets management is the process of ensuring passwords, API keys, certificates, etc. The process took 2 months. Fewer alerts means the alerts should be something to take note of, and possibly take action on. Personal finance is not something many college students think aboutpartially because its not taught in school and partially because we dont have any money to worry about anyway. This contribution was merged as well. YAML does human readable key/value storage right. Coachis the beginning of that platform. If we receive a request for a URL we didn't define, it will 404. -> % coach create project --type ruby_app 'coach.yml' configuration file added -- update it based on your project's needs When you run that, the CLI creates the smallcoach.ymlconfiguration definition file discussed earlier. 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. 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. That means, x=[a1,a2,,a7,b1,b2d7]. Whats the best way to have a lack of compensation and incentive conversation in your department? I was part of the Core CRM Team. Throughout the process, we identified several discrepancies between JavaScript and R function outputs, so we regularly reconciled the differences. Free interview details posted anonymously by Betterment interview candidates. Getting in the habit of asking these questions during code review should lead to more frequent conversations about security and data access. 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. Onboarding a newproject One of the main reasons for standardizing the interface and automating the configuration generation was to onboard new applications more quickly. Even though code reuse presented itself as a win, the larger concerns behind user experience, server lag, and new infrastructure overhead motivated us to rethink our approach, prioritizing the user experience and minimizing engineering overhead. Building Better Software Faster with Shared Principles Betterments playbook for extending the golden hour of startup innovation at scale. 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. We supportwordpress_app,java_library,java_app,ruby_gem,ruby_app, andjavascript_libraryfor now. 1. This manual testing was tedious and time consuming for engineers, whose time is expensive. The solution we came up with is called charlatan and it's open-source and available on pub.dev. Such linked websites are not monitored, investigated, or checked for accuracy or completeness by Betterment. All interviewers were very nice and easy to talk to, one of the better interview experiences while searching for an entry level role. 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. Jesse Harrelson: Seriously though, it was the combination of all that plus so many other things. Asked for feedback after the rejection and didn't get any. We might take a look at the metrics were using (the SLIs), the failures that chipped away at our target goal, and, if necessary, re-evaluate the relevancy of what were measuring. I stayed there for several years until last May, when I uprooted my life to New York for Betterment, and I havent looked back since. Too tough to call. ;) IDE of choice? Luckily, I wont have to struggle with building an investment portfolio or worry about unreasonable fees. Its nice to give candidates a short break in between interviews, but the main reason for the separation is to evaluate the handoff. There's a human conversation and negotiation to be had about these contracts, and you can fool yourself into thinking you don't need to have that conversation if you've got a file that guarantees that you and your collaborator service are speaking the same language; you may be speaking the same words, but you might not infer the same meaning. 1. These tests use the same widgetTester API that regular Widget tests use but they are designed to run on a simulator, emulator, or preferably a real device. Using a separate CSS manifest with the core changes enumerated above, we felt free to dedicate resources to more thoroughly rebranding our high traffic experiences, deferring improvements to pages that received the initial reskin until after launch. Find out what is missing from the rails app. Continuous Delivery (CD) at scale is hard to get right. We needed a solution that not only maintained our security posture throughout the software development lifecycle, but also enforced our opinions about how secrets should be managed across environments. We use a multi-threaded web server for our production application, and so when we make a call into the Julia shared library, we push that call onto a queue where it gets picked up and performed by a single executor thread which then communicates the result back to the calling thread using apromiseobject. We still have our route, controller, and model, but instead of a jbuilder for returning JSON, we can port our template to embedded Ruby, and let the server do all the work. Betterment recruiter reached out to me about a Trading team opening. Use SQLite database to be efficient The best way to store the user transaction objects was to use JSON, a human-readable representation of Java objects. This is made possible, at least in part, by the ability to perform units of work asynchronously. This is why we adoptedDockerto run a production-like Airflow cluster from the ground up on our development machines. When theres no more work to be had, the worker shuts itself down. To assist us in expediting this workflow, we had an alias in our bash_profiles that allowed us to run a shortcut at the command line to encrypt the secret value from our clipboard and then insert that secret value in the appropriate Ansible variables file for the appropriate environment. If I do an analysis with open-source tools like R or Python, I can post full end-to-end instructions that anyone in the world can reproduce, check, and expand upon. Second, flutter_driver is more about UI/E2E testing rather than integration testing, meaning wed need to run an instance of the app on a device, navigate to a flow we wanted to test, and then test the flow. As we neared the finish line, the rebranded world became our default and this opt-out world became a variant. This principle keeps us from ever having the opportunity to make some of the mistakes addressed in our next section. And therein lies the rub, because whether or not our job queue is colocated with our application data will greatly inform the way that we write any job-adjacent code. the trust root chain. Depends on my feelings about the problem I'm working on. Its no longer just a script that sometimes works and sometimes doesnt. More generally, Lets let be the expected value of holding fund F in account A. Circling back to the original problem, we want to rearrange the holdings in Joes accounts in a way thats maximally valuable in the future. Now assume that the $50,000 in each account is invested into a portfolio of 70% stocks and 30% bonds. In addition to problems arising from the types of questions asked, we saw that one of our primary interview tools, the whiteboard, was actually getting in the way; many candidates struggled to communicate their solutions using a whiteboard in an interview setting. On the alerting side, we have DataDog monitors in place for overall queue statistics, like max age SLA violations, so that we can alert and page ourselves when queues arent working off jobs quickly enough.
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