Paddy, who hosts the meetups, let us know that Betterment was launching an apprenticeship program and after the meetup I asked how I could get involved and applied for the program. Its been an incredible journey, so I sat down with them to hear first hand about their experiences. Opens the Fishbowl by Glassdoor site in a new window, Get started with your Free Employer Profile, The Ultimate Job Interview Preparation Guide. Maintain a tight feedback loop The team follows an agile process familiar to modern technology organizations. I was one of those kids who broke their toys in order to find out how they worked. We want to be able to define fakes in a single place, so when we add a new one, we can easily find it and change it. The unlimited supply of iced coffee. Opens the Fishbowl by Glassdoor site in a new window. Ultimately, using fake plugins works well and makes this a satisfyingly functional testing solution. In short, these bugs allow attackers to access data directly using its unique identifiers even if that data belongs to someone else because the application fails to take authorization into account. 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. Ship It Our first run of this new process took place in November 2015. Engineering at Betterment: Do You Have to Be a Financial Expert? Colorado: $175,000 - $190,000. Last but certainly not least is our new baby, the data warehouse. We believe this is important so that we can quickly tell which secrets an app is dependent on just by opening the file. Before we built TCP, Betterment customers had each account managed as a separate, standalone portfolio. End-to-end-ish tests using fake HTTP in Flutter We write tests in order to prove our features work as intended and we run those tests consistently to prove that our features don't stop working as intended. Or perhaps we notice that what were measuring is becoming increasingly irrelevant to a customer experience, and we can get rid of the SLO entirely! 5. Extending AirflowCode Airflow tasks that pass data to each other can run on different machines, presenting a new challenge versus running everything on a single machine. What are some ways we can all work together to empower each other in overcoming imposter syndrome? We were able to overcome this and begin filling out the middle level of our testing pyramid by adding structure on top of the widget testing API that allows us to test full flows from start to finish. Total of 6 interviews (phone and in person) Over time, a handful of these teams formed deviating opinions on what kind of acceptance criteria they had for CI. LinkedIn question - Architect the LinkedIn home screen (feed) for the mobile app. If we did away with the whiteboard, then what would we use? We decided to create that large file by ostensibly concatenating smaller components together. Today: A Better Interview Heres our revised interview process: Resum review Initial phone screen Technical phone screen Onsite: Technical interview 1 Ask the candidate to describe a recent technical challenge in detail Set up the candidates laptop Introduce the pair programming problem and explore the problem Pair programming (optional, time permitting) Technical interview 2 Pair programming Technical interview 3 Pair programming Ask-Me-Anything session Product and design interview Hiring manager interview Company executive interview While an interview setting may not offer pair programming in its purest sense, our interviewers truly participate in the process of writing software with the candidates. I did not get the offer but I would have declined as I was offered a position from two other companies. So if you havent already, make sure to enable test randomization in your Flutter codebase today! I was also invited back the following week to speak with another product person and the CTO. Lets say it is. How To Choose A Job Framework The delayed rubygem is a fork of both delayed_job and delayed_job activerecord, with several targeted changes and additions, including numerous performance & scalability optimizations that well cover towards the end of this post. While we tried to construct computer science and data modelling problems that led to informative interviews, watching candidates solve these problems still wasnt getting to the heart of whether theyd be successful engineers once at Betterment. Unfortunately, our google-fu was bad and we didn't find anything until after we went and implemented something ourselves. We already do something like this for some jobs with our journaled gem, which uses AWS Kinesis to funnel event payloads out to our data warehouse (while at the same time benefiting from the same at-least-once delivery guarantees as our other jobs!). He gave several KTs necessary for the tasks to be done. The solutions that come out of that awareness are game-changing. Handle a few basic cases and be done with them. Once we migrate to Rails 5, we should even be able to easily take advantage of Turbolinks 3, which is a conventionalized way to do regional AJAX updates. More generally, how do we take an inflow of money and allocate it to weighted buckets in a fair, penny-precise way? We can click on any of these links and know exactly where they go based on the logoof the service. We need to be able to have the library active when running tests or doing local development, but do not want to have it running in a production environmentif it remains active in a real environment, it might affect real customer accounts, which we cannot afford. NDA signed. Let us know what you think! Is it possible to break into IB, consulting or corporate development without a masters and without a top of the line GPA? To meet these needs, we created Blazer, an extension of the Backbone router. 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. By knowing that the Coach app is aruby_appwe know how many jobs will need to be run and when. Our engineering team here at Betterment takes security seriously. In doing all of these things, weve reduced bottlenecks for developers so they can focus more on shipping features and less on managing secrets. In the case of service level indicators (basically metrics collection), the Coach CLI provides commands that generate yaml files to be stored in GitHub alongside application code. We then moved into a coding problem that involved writing classes to model data and logic to query that data to answer increasingly complex questions. These interviews are in Ruby on Rails - know ruby on rails beforehand, since it is difficult to read / implement on the spot. 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. We need to be economical about what we insert into the database (and how often) to avoid slowing down the test suite too much over time. Our approach We decided to build our Julia codebase inside amonorepo, with separate packages for each conceptual project we might work on, such as interest rate models, projections, social security amount calculations and so on. Overall, the process was great. I searched every new term I came across and, when that wasnt enough, asked my co-workers for help. Once this feature went live, it was extremely rewarding to see our targeted universalism approach reveal its benefits. The result would let us offer a permanent home for our retirement advice that would be always on for our end customers. The first step in this translation was to deprecate our not-very-descriptively named #firstname method and push engineers to start using two new, descriptive methods called #legalfirstname and #commonfirstname (#commonfirstname is essentially a defaulting method that falls back to #legalfirstname if #preferredfirst_name is not present for that user). Tell me about a time you collaborated at work. With this blank slate in front of us we were able to iterate quickly by manually adding different jobs and steps to that file. In order to have control over that plugin, this app has also made a thin wrapper service for that. Each project needs a configuration definition file (coach.yml) that declares its project_type. Crys also built out a delightful flow that shows the user why we require their legal name, that answers a few common questions, and allows them to edit their preferred first name in the future if needed. 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. Plus, even when running in the most durable mode, Redis-based ActiveJob backends tend to dequeue jobs before they are executed, meaning that if a worker process crashes at the wrong moment, or is terminated during a code deployment, the job is lost. LABiometryType Since weve beensecurely using Touch ID for years, adapting our existing implementation to include Face ID was a relatively minor change. But at one point (fairly recently, honestly), it just clicked that I knew what I was doing. The reply completion closure ofevaluatePolicy(_:localizedReason:reply:) This made testing from the iOS Simulator a viable option for gaining a reasonable degree of certainty that our application would behave as expected when running on a device, thus allowing us to prepare a build in advance of having a device to test on. 5. The second restrictionmaintaining the portfolio allocation of 50% stocks and 50% bondsmight seem straightforward, but theres a catch. Phone screen, technical assessment, "in-person" over zoom as a final interview. From a high level view I essentially split this large engineering lift into two different streams of work. To get each amount, take the ratio of the contribution from your normal paycheck to the total of your normal paycheck, and multiply that by your bonus. You'll also practice critically evaluating your own code, and you'll build technical communication skills that will help you prepare for job interviews and collaborative work as a software engineer. Also note, do not get your hopes up if you get a personal call from your recruiter after the final interview. Certain snappy user experience elements dont work as well without JavaScript. In the rack app, we define the routes we care about for the things we normally would have stubbed in the tests. Transitioning from Luigi toAirflow Our single-server approach usedLuigi, a Python module created to orchestrate long-running batch jobs with dependencies. What is an SLO? AWS KMS doesanchoredencryption right. It also doesnt assist users in acting on the results it gives. Being surrounded by a bunch of smart, helpful people has also been super amazing and helped me grow as an engineer. Putting it alltogether Our configuration generator is doing a lot more than just taping together jobs in a workflowwe evaluate dependency graphs and only run certain jobs that have upstream changes or are triggered themselves. Stats: 88% satisfied candidates post-interview; 57% avg. Theres actually a critical security bug here that allows the client to specify any attachment_id, even if they dont own that attachment - eek! This includes validations, instance and class method inputs and outputs, Active Record callbacks, and other model behaviors. I interviewed at Betterment (New York, NY). These interviews are in Ruby on Rails - know ruby on rails beforehand, since it is difficult to read / implement on the spot. When the app starts up, the decrypted secrets will be available as environment variables only to the process running the application instead of being available system wide. Jesse Harrelson, a Betterment Software Engineer, not only leads our hosting events, they found a path to Betterment through Women Who Code. Be the first to find this interview helpful, If you had $10k how would you sell yourself for the role. Depends on my feelings about the problem I'm working on. So, the second major difference is that we inject a fake HTTP configuration into our network stack so that we can run nearly all of our code for real but cut out the other unreliable and costly dependency. Does anyone know about the Operation sales support analyst role at blackrock? At Betterment, were working on our own set of initiatives to drive the conversation. Maybe we need to reevaluate the metrics were collecting, or perhaps were okay with setting a lower target goal because there are other targets that will be more important to our customers. Here's how we did it. Now assume that the $50,000 in each account is invested into a portfolio of 70% stocks and 30% bonds. If Betterment has a relationship or affiliation with the author or content, it will note this in additional disclosure. We not only had unit tests such as the one above to test simple scenarios where a human could calculate the outcome, but we also ran the optimizer in a simulated production-like environment, through hundreds of thousands of scenarios that closely resembled real ones. So, your college savings fund would get: (310/1000)*1234.56 = 382.7136 We can do the same for your other three accounts, but you may have noticed a problem. And this is precisely why, at Betterment, we start each application off with a database-backed queue, co-located with the rest of the apps data, with the guarantee of at-least-once job execution. Flutter provides good solutions for both screen testing and UI testing, but what about the middle-ground? We like to evaluate how well a candidate explains the design decisions and progress from one interviewer to the next. When a PR is merged, our team takes care of redistributing the new version of the library so engineers can update their configuration. It ensures that new features can be shipped more quickly, it allows new services to adopt our standardized CI strategy with ease, and it lets us recover faster in the face of disastera hurricane causing a power outage at one of our data centers. Have we violated our error budget every month for the past three months? Already tried it out? It might take some time to convince the rest of your organization to receive reports in these more modern formats. Were able to write tests specific to the component without worrying about the use-case or increasing testing time for our apps. I interviewed at Betterment in Feb 2022. I dragged my chair ten feet across the office and began my new life as the engineering lead of Betterments nascent data teammy new mates included two talented data analysts, a data warehousing engineer and a marketing analyst, also the product owner. As such, information on this page may not be up to date. What all of these tasks had in common (aside from being, well, really important to our business) is that they were executed via a database-backed job-execution framework called Delayed, a newly-open-sourced library that were excited to announce right now, as part of this blog post! 1 Betterment Software Engineering interview questions and 1 interview reviews. This manual testing was tedious and time consuming for engineers, whose time is expensive. That code should take me from the raw data to the conclusions. 3. As a result, we had to build features into sopsorific to allow vendor provided secrets that didnt meet the sopsorific standards by default to be accepted by sopsorifics checks. Some of these are: Secrets are unguessableShort strings like password are not really secrets and this check enforces strings that are at least 128 bits of entropy expressed in unpadded base64. Not to mention almost everything else I needed I was able to learn through Google, which makes me wonder if I could have learned Java through the Internet in a few weeks rather than spending the past two years in school? This leaves our app looking something like this: Given that this is approximately what the app looks like, the test harness needs to grant control of the HttpClient and the ImageCropperService. Continuous Delivery (CD) at scale is hard to get right. Whats missing? For APIs that we build for ourselves (e.g. Working here offered me the opportunity to learn about finance while still being immersed in tech startup culture. Copyright 2008-2023, Glassdoor, Inc. "Glassdoor" and logo are registered trademarks of Glassdoor, Inc. Since we believe strongly in our users right to say no, resolving this design issue was the primary reason we prioritized shipping this update. Then Newman. On the other hand, some methods are just a means for us to mark content as already safe. To facilitate versioning and sharing of our Julia packages internally (e.g. This summer, I had the privilege of participating in a software engineering internship with Betterment. My experience this summer has been invaluable, and I will be returning to school with a brand new view on software development and what a career in this awesome field will be like. As demonstrated, Rails provides some methods that mark content as safe without escaping it for us. I think they said the second one is with a recruiter and there are a few more rounds after. 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. We liked notifying engineers when a deploy began, but we needed to be more accurate about who we were notifying. Secrets management is the process of ensuring passwords, API keys, certificates, etc. Technical interview (computer science fundamentals), Technical interview (modelling and app design), Ask the candidate to describe a recent technical challenge in detail, Introduce the pair programming problem and explore the problem, Pair programming (optional, time permitting). Now, in our updated portfolio with a more sophisticated way to allocate, we are using a matrix to manage asset weightsand that requires more complex trading logic. While there was a lot of work involved in making our actual implementation production-ready (and a lot more work can be done to improve it), being able to express rules coming out of a regulatory document as a series of bounds and constraints via anonymous functions was a win for the readability of our code base. the shared preferences plugin can use a single integration test to provide certainty that it works as intended. For example, a task computing all of a prior days activity executed at midnight would be inaccurate if Redshift were missing data from DMS at midnight due to lag. On-site interview included a 1 hr AMA lunch session which I really enjoyed. So does the delayed approach scale? I went above and beyond for years doing extra work, organizations etc and nothing has been reflected in pay. To learn more about engineering at Betterment, visit the engineering page on the Betterment Resource Center. Legacy code is a form of technical debtthe sooner it gets fixed, the less time it will take to fix in the future. But the era of the spreadsheet is over. 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. Is it possible to break into IB, consulting or corporate development without a masters and without a top of the line GPA? First, lets take a look at the underlying framework we use for enqueuing and executing said jobs. In this model there is no single controller. We made the decision to maximize the expected after-tax value of a customers holdings after having achieved the minimum possible drift. I applied online. In person pair programming was in Ruby only. Compile the Julia code into a shared library, and call it directly from Ruby usingFFI. Jennifer Arguello - I met Jennifer at the White House Tech Inclusion Summit back in 2013, where we hit it off talking about diversity in tech and her time with the Latino Startup Alliance. Why dont we use Feature Specs? Sounds simple enough! One challenge we have that most existing iOS apps share is the need to still support older iOS versions. Senior Executive - Software Engineer. Lets say that his Roth IRA holds $2,750 of VTI, and $2,750 of VWOB. But a scaled engineering org presents other challenges that could just as easily put the goal out of reach. With my start-up survival kit in tow, it was time to move on from my job as a back-office engineer. How it works now Now that we knowwhocan do what, lets talk abouthow they can do what they can do. On top of being less impactful, these sad paths usually give feedback on the same screen as the input, meaning those sad path cases are usually better tested at the screen test level anyway. Fortunately, it was a fun experience and it really took very little time! Effectively, this means maintaining only a baseline level of workers throughout the day and scaling up during peaks when our workload increases. 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. In sops, weve found a tool that combines all of these things enabling a workflow that makes secrets management easier. Though there are many types of specs, in our workflow we focus on only three: model specs, request specs, and system specs. To accomplish this, we need to define new decision variables. CI is now a mechanism for instantly sharing the benefits of discovery made in isolated exploration, with everyone. While we didnt run a scientifically valid split-test for the new process versus the old (it wouldve taken years to reach statistical significance), our hiring metrics have improved across the board. The process took 2 months. Similarly, even our authorized endpoints never allow one user to peer into another users object graph. 1) Phone screen about the company 30 min Q & A with head of recruiting - you ask questions, recruiter asks questions Another change is that the entire onsite interview is completed in a single day. But were getting into pretty uncharted territory here, and, as always, your mileage may vary! This meant there was minimal test environment setup. Multiply the inflow (or the payout in the example above) by each weight (where the weights are the integer amounts of the buckets, so the contributions to the ticket in our example above), and divide each of these products by the sum of the buckets, finding the integer quotient and integer remainder Find the number of pennies that will be left over to allocate by taking the inflow minus the total of the integer quotients Sort the remainders in descending order and allocate any leftover pennies to the buckets in this order The idea here is that the quotients represent the amounts we should give each bucket aside from the leftover pennies. This means any unhandled exception occurring in your Julia code will result in a segmentation fault. The interviews varied between programming questions, system design and behavioral. Jesse Harrelson: Coding became a hobby for me when I would make websites for my bands in Nashville, but after meeting up with more and more people in tech in the city, I knew it was something I wanted to do as a career. While we love the concern that our engineers show toward solving these problems, these deviations became problematic for applications of the same runtime that should abide by the same set of rules; for example, all Ruby apps should runRSpecandRubocop, not just some of them. I highly recommend using it. Find contacts: direct phone number, email address, work experience. Finally, to bolt this on to an IRL application, we need the ability to define fakes incrementally and migrate them into existing integrations that we have, one by one. This is because code in the body of the main function and the bodies of groups only runs once and it does so immediately. With a solid plan for gathering user input, we pivoted to the bigger question: Where should we use a customers preferred first name? There are a few other advantages and problems this system solves too: Were able to make global changes in a pretty painless way. One Massive Monte Carlo, One Very Efficient Solution We optimized our portfolio management algorithms in six hours for less than $500. 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. These were our inputs. If its a reasonable addition to CI, our thought is that everyone should benefit. At first glance the places where we used #firstname in-app seemed minimalemails, in-app greetings, tax documents. I avoided commenting on projects and making suggestions because I thought that my insight would just be dumb, and not necessary. Finally, flutter_driver is not built to run a suite of tests or to run easily in CI. 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!) In order to effectively work on multiple pieces of an app, an engineer needs to be fluent in multiple different languages. Just the portfolio transition work alone includes significant new code for front-end enhancements which have nothing to do with trading. This algorithm is called theLargest Remainder Method. 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. This means we must continuously iterate on our recruiting process to remain competitive in attracting and hiring top talent. We useUpstartto define all Airflow services and simply wrap the TERM behavior in our workers post-stop script, sending the TERM signal first, waiting until we see the Celery process stopped, then finally poweroff the machine. Williams goal is to help women recognize the characteristic and empower them to overcome it. The SLO is the target percentage, 99.9%. It's clich, but just getting to know one another and sharing how you feel about certain situations at work is such a great way to empower yourself and empower others. Focusing on What Matters: Using SLOs to Pursue User Happiness Proper reliability is the greatest operational requirement for any service. Engineering Background RetireGuide started its journey as a set of functions written in the R programming language, which Betterments investment analytics team uses extensively for internal research. We also split the main programming portion of our original interview into separate sections with different interviewers. Here are the top interview tools for software engineers, along with everything you need to know before making a decision on which solution to buy: pricing, implementation, candidate experience, etc. Dynamicism. In order to do this, we built out a fake http client that allows us to configure network responses for given requests. 9.830lbsoffoodfromElaine's. Typically, they use real devices or sometimes a simulator/emulator and real backend services. Their goal is to test you on your collaboration skills (as well as technical skill). I recommend going back to LC style questions in the interview or at least have a couple of mock projects ready in several languages similar to the take home test. Alternatively, stick to only interviewing candidates who know Ruby. Its worth noting that in our case, were using Rubys sort_by method, which gives us a nondeterministic order in the case where remainders are equal.
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