In fact, sometimes it was hard to even know where to start to make changes. If we attempted to deploy this code, RuboCop would fail the build, preventing the code from going out while letting reviewers know exactly why. Building and maintaining the worlds largest independent robo-advisor requires a world-class team of human engineers. R and Python both have great tools to produce finished reports as static HTML or PDF documents, or even interactive reporting and visualization products. Option 1 is a very common pattern, and actually quite similar to what had been the status quo at Betterment, as most of the projections and recommendation code existed in a JavaScript service. 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) I moved to Nashville to study songwriting and music business, and started a small label through which I released my bands album. Please query for the associated record in a way that enforces authorization (e.g. When theres no more work to be had, the worker shuts itself down. As soon as the bug was fixed, we wanted to ensure that we had automated tests to handle a similar issue in the future. 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. We decided to lean on RuboCop for this work. Heavy mocking can make tests harder to read, harder to maintain, and provide less assurance that code is working as expected. Different properties may be provided by a different entity with different marketing standards. Betterment Software Engineer Interview Questions | Glassdoor 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. From an applications perspective, this relationship between a biometric scanner and the Secure Enclave is simplified to a boolean response. 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. 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. There are plenty of other features that weve built that havent made it into the delayed gem quite yet. Currently, our Web application is a JavaScript single-page app that uses a frontend MVC framework, backed by a JSON api. Free interview details posted anonymously by Betterment interview candidates. In Luigi, we knew when the data was pulled and only then would we trigger a task. What our SRE Team Needed Our design and UX was informed by what our engineers using our platform needed, but Coach was built based on our needs. We would receive immediate feedback in the CircleCI interface when those jobs ran, and this feedback loop helped us iterate even faster. Theres so many things I would love to list here. 6 more interviews with other potential team members. I interviewed at Betterment (New York, NY). It was clear this part of the interviewing process needed to go. Striking the right balance between these priorities and thoroughly executing both is paramount to RetireGuides success, and we didnt want to miss the mark on either dimension. Make a feature or two. When the worker is idle and ready for more work, it takes it upon itself to go out and find it. I feel like if the tone was set immediately, or if i just got an email rejection, it would've hurt a lot less, but it was so cheery up until the "unfortunately we have decided not to move forward with your application" that it hit like a sack of bricks. More generally, how do we take an inflow of money and allocate it to weighted buckets in a fair, penny-precise way? If youre significantly exercising behavior not in the layer youre writing a test for, you might be putting the test in the wrong place. We built our own internal framework for modeling mathematical programs that was not tied to our trading systems domain-specific business logic. A good analysis excludes them based on objective rules from the beginning and then tests for sensitivity to these exclusions later. This makes our secrets less likely to unintentionally leak and our security team a little happier. One Massive Monte Carlo, One Very Efficient Solution We optimized our portfolio management algorithms in six hours for less than $500. Throughout this journey, we learned many things along the way. We store fake responses with a URI template, a status code, and a body. Lets assume we already know that VTI has a higher expected value in Joes taxable account, and that VWOB has a higher expected value in his Roth IRA. 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. 10 Common job interview questions for Civil Engineer. Copyright 2008-2023, Glassdoor, Inc. "Glassdoor" and logo are registered trademarks of Glassdoor, Inc. Then a light came on. Failed after the onsite interview because apparently my tech skills weren't "up to par." The Results It's important to take a pragmatic approach to refactoring legacy code. To find a solution, we drew inspiration fromthe component approachused by modern design systems and JavaScript frameworks. By incorporating many of these practices, it is steadily becoming more and more fun to develop on the Betterment platform. They're an answer to the question "how can we approximate end-to-end tests for a fraction of the cost?" Touch ID evaluation prompt displaying the localized reason While Face ID does not seem to make a use of that localizedReason string during evaluation, without the privacy string the iPhone X will run the applications Local Authentication feature in compatibility mode. 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. Friction here refers to ambiguity of CI results and the uncertainty of knowing where your code is in the CI/CD process. We wrote tests around the methods in question. Its nice to give candidates a short break in between interviews, but the main reason for the separation is to evaluate the handoff. We reinvented our Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team last fall with our sights set on building software to help developers move faster, be happier, and feel empowered. The resulting analytical master file was still large, but small enough to fit on a regular MacBook Pro. On the way into SQLite, GSON allowed us to flatten the objects, leaving only the bits that pertained to trading and discarding the rest. We hired Jesse Harrelson (Betterment for Advisors Team) and Fidel Severino (Retail Team) for a 90 day Apprentice Program. Citrus Informatics Engineering - Software & QA Department Reviews We, however, are not using it. A recruiter followed up within two days and we did a call to discuss qualifications. Wed shrink the expected results we got from production, then re-inflate and compare them to what our tests produced. Weve found it to be a great solution to our own version of the two-language problemthe idea that the language in which it is most convenient to write a program is not necessarily the language in which it makes the most sense to run that program. Below is an example request spec. Making a fake implementation of that plugin is typically as easy as making another class, prefixing its name with Fake and having it implement the public contract of the regular plugin class with suitably real but not quite real behavior. Working here offered me the opportunity to learn about finance while still being immersed in tech startup culture. Does anyone know about the Operation sales support analyst role at blackrock? To illustrate, lets suppose youre a Betterment customer with three different accounts: a Roth IRA, a traditional IRA, and a taxable retirement account. What to Use, and How Short answer: R or Python. Someone asked for my help on something, and then I discussed something with him, and suddenly I just felt so much more secure in my job. Free interview details posted anonymously by Betterment interview candidates. sopsorific runis another custom command we built to make our usage of sops seamless. You may have noticed that unlike the previous example, the vulnerable code doesnt directly reference a params.permit call or any of the parameter names, but the code was still flagged. Keeping rules #1 and #2 in mind, weve created two cops: Betterment/UnscopedFind and Betterment/AuthorizationInController; these will flag any models being retrieved and created in potentially unsafe ways, respectively. Do This will correctly print A,B,C,A,D,E (A prints twice because setUpis run before each test) Tip 3: Scope test objects as closely as possible to the tests that need them In the same way that we prefer to keep shared state as low in the Widget tree as possible, keep your test objects close to the tests that utilize them. These include authentication, view rendering, selecting an http response code, redirecting, and setting cookies. Sopsorific bootstraps these KMS keys and IAM roles for a given application. One system spec that asserts the happy path will be sufficient for most features. Free interview details posted anonymously by Betterment interview candidates. However, for failures, we didnt want to sit around for five minutes crossing our fingers hoping that everything was successful only to be told that we could have known three minutes earlier that wed forgotten a newline at the end of one of our files. By doing this piecemeal, we are hoping to bake in useful patterns early on, which we can iterate and use to make migrating the next part even simpler. By partnering with Peoplism and building a long-term, action-oriented plan, were working to create real change in a sustainable fashion. One next step were excited about is an examination of our mentorship program to make sure that everyone at Betterment has access to mentors. How likely is it that youll spot a copy-paste error at row 403,658? I avoided commenting on projects and making suggestions because I thought that my insight would just be dumb, and not necessary. These questions open up an entirely different can of worms, one that we would prefer remained firmly sealed. Weve extended the gem with information on erroring jobs (jobs that are in the process of retrying but have not yet permanently failed), as well as the ability to filter by additional fields such as job name, priority, and the owning team (which we store in an additional column). The test runner will print the seed it chose at the beginning of test execution, and you can reliably use that seed to reproduce the failure and be confident in your fix once the test begins passing. We are built from the ground up on a foundation of data. Non app owners have the ability to assume the secret-editor role for non-sensitive ecosystems only. We therefore have the added benefit of knowing that updates to CI have been tested and are deemed valid and working before theyre distributed, and we can prevent folks from removing a feature without considering the impact it may have. NSFaceIDUsageDescription The other difference with Face ID is the newNSFaceIDUsageDescriptionprivacy string that should be included in the applicationsInfo.plistfile. Their goal is to test you on your collaboration skills (as well as technical skill). Build a killer testing framework When dealing with legacy code, one of our top priorities is to preserve existing functionality. Notifications When we merge our SLO templates into this repository, Coach will manage creating SLO resources in Datadog and accompanying SLO alerts (that ping slack channels of our choice) if and when our SLOs violate their target goals. The process took 3 weeks. At first glance, it looks like the developer has taken the right steps to adhere to Rule #1 via the document method and were using strong params, is that enough? AWS Regions do resilience right. On the other hand, some methods are just a means for us to mark content as already safe. The optimization will be partly driven by a more sophisticated asset allocation algorithm, which will dynamically vary individual asset allocations within the stock and bond basket based on a goals overall allocation. Using UJS patterns, our view can live completely on the server. 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. if unit tests ran on 20 containers and 18 of them saw failures, only notify once) Only notifyonceabout all the green things Give as muchcontextas possible without being overwhelming: beconcisebutclear Next well explore the changes we made in content. Its exciting to see how Ive developed since I first started attending meetups, and how some of our long-time attendees have grown as engineers and as professionals. Building A Community Of Our Own In 2018, our Women of Betterment group had an idea. As we neared the finish line, the rebranded world became our default and this opt-out world became a variant. Unfortunately, our google-fu was bad and we didn't find anything until after we went and implemented something ourselves. Coach will send us a message when that date rolls around to encourage us to take a deeper look at our measurements and possibly reevaluate our goals around measuring this part of our service. As a fellow software engineer, I can personally attest to experiencing this phenomenon in tech, but Ive also heard from friends and colleagues that it can be present in non-technical backgrounds, as well. Julia is a newer language that looked like a perfect fit for the investing team for a number of reasons: Speed. In short, our devs needed to be able to run individual services in isolation; by default they were set to communicate with one another, meaning an engineer would have to run all of the services locally in order to work on any one service. We knew that a star schema approach would help us clarify a data narrative and give all of us a consistent view of truth. By knowing that the Coach app is aruby_appwe know how many jobs will need to be run and when. Each would ask same question , only rephrased. First, lets take a look at the underlying framework we use for enqueuing and executing said jobs. Learn with us and from us, and while youre at it, teach us what you know. Just keep an eye on it. Then, instead of operating one giant queue, well have broken things down to a number of smaller queues, each with their own worker pools, emitting metrics that can be aggregated with almost the same observability story we have today. The Problem Proportional allocation comes up often throughout our codebase, but its easiest to explain using a fictional example: Suppose your paychecks are $1000 each, and you always allocate them to your different savings accounts as follows: College savings fund: $310 Buy a car fund: $350 Buy a house fund: $200 Safety net: $140 Now suppose youre an awesome employee and received a bonus of $1234.56. Heres the optimal solution: Managing Engineering Complexity Reaching the optimal balances would require our system to buy and sell securities in Joes investment accounts. Betterment Junior Software Engineer Interview Questions 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. While running R server-side is a win on code-reuse, its a loss on scalability and user experience. Now, back to the future These are just the first few bootstrapping steps. Were continually evaluating whether to adopt this process for other roles, as well. Google Play and the Google Play logo are trademarks of Google, Inc. Apple, the Apple logo, and iPhone are trademarks of Apple, Inc., registered in the U.S. Betterment assumes no responsibility or liability whatsoever for the content, accuracy, reliability or opinions expressed in a third-party website, to which a published article links (a linked website). Recruiter was great in connecting me with more engineers and managers to get more insight onto the role and culture. Dan Kubb's email & phone number - Senior Staff Software Engineer at Weve also developed a partnership with Peoplism. At the time, we also couldnt find a way to federate permissions with Ansible Vault in a way that didnt hinder our workflow by causing a bottleneck for developers. And for our server, we need to add a route, a controller, a model, and a jbuilder to render that model as JSON. To answer that question, Ill leave you with one last takeaway. This was one reason for automating the process, but the downsides of human-managed software were another. That is, most apps rely on one (or sometimes a few) backend APIs, typically powered by HTTP. On the Ruby end, we built agemwhich wraps our Julia library and attaches to it usingRuby-FFI. 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. We escape content primarily to avoid opening ourselves up to XSS (cross-site scripting) attacks. 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 approach puts candidates at ease, and feels closer to typical pair programming than one might expect. Arguments provided to the minimize function Objective function With the package were using, there is no option to maximize. Apply the learnings to future The less legacy code we have, the less we have to deal with the aforementioned processes. Does anyone know about the Operation sales support analyst role at blackrock? query: # (total_events - bad_events) over total_events == good_events/total_events numerator: sum:trace.rack.request.hits{service:coach,env:production,resource_name:deployscontroller_create}.as_count()-sum:trace.rack.request.errors{service:coach,env:production,resource_name:deployscontroller_create}.as_count() denominator: sum:trace.rack.request.hits{service:coach,resource_name:deployscontroller_create}.as_count() We love having these SLOs defined in GitHub because we can track who's changing them, how they're changing, and get review from peers. The end result: a completely fresh set of views and a new brand were excited to share with the world at large. We cant split a penny into fractions, so we cant give your college savings fund the exact proportional amount. If we were willing to accept tight coupling between our services, specifically in their API contracts, we'd be well-served by a tool like Pact. 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. This employer has claimed their Employer Profile and is engaged in the Glassdoor community. Explain previous projects 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). Phone screen, technical assessment, "in-person" over zoom as a final interview. Here's how we did it. Asking for someones name is simple, but full of assumptions. View Gabriel Talavera's email address: gxxxxxxxa@betterment.com & phone: +1-xxx-xxx-8082's profile as Senior Software Engineer at Betterment, located in Los Angeles, California. The cost of maintaining a separate codebase is well worth the benefits to our customers and our code quality. As shown above, weve asserted that the sum of the balances in funds including U.S. total market stocks (in this case, only VTI), plus some net drift amount in that asset class, must be equal to the target balance of that asset class in the portfolio (which in this case, is 50% of Joes total holdings). Can we talk about why you decided to become an Engineer? In Summary Unlike authentication, authorization is context specific and difficult to abstract away from the leaf nodes of application code. If we do this right, we will be able to swap everything to a normal Rails app with minimal effort. 12.00% 3.200lbsofthyme. Make sure our engineers dont mute their slack notifications In leaving the Old World of inconsistent and contextually sparse communication we looked at our blank canvas and initially thought every time the tests pass, send a notification! When writing code, we try to keep in mind that we probably won't come back later and clean up the code, and that we never know who the next person to touch this code will be. See IRA limits here and 401(k) limits. (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. 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. Normally, this is a process that can literally take years (and may explain why legacy investing services are slow to switch to algorithmic asset allocation and advice.) The sample code below illustrates how we generated the constraints for our model. At Betterment, were working on our own set of initiatives to drive the conversation. While possible to run in CI, it would be incredibly costly to run on each commit since the tests need to run on actual devices. Our first run of this new process took place in November 2015. In a few anecdotes throughout your talk, you mentioned the importance of having mentors and role models. I was nervous to work in an industry I knew nothing about. This is why Betterment has a rule requiring UUIDs for all new tables. Notice the two WebMock stub_requests calls at the top. That means that our goal when writing tests should be to figure out how to achieve our target level of confidence that our features work as intended as affordably as possible. Any insights would be helpful. I aced all my other onsite interviews and I currently have two offers from FAANG companies and a handful of offers from some other startups. You will need to be passingly familiar with the language they're using. Our hiring managers now report that they have a much clearer understanding of what each candidate brings to the table. How did we doit? One of the things we chatted about after the talk was how empowering it is to have the resources and movements of our generation to bring more diversity to the tech industry. Request specs for APIs are owned by the consuming apps team to ensure that the invariants that they expect to hold are not broken. Abletocarry8.0pounds. The first round of "in person" interviews. It also really felt like the company was working in good faith the entire process and I definitely took notice. Why Background Jobs? In person pair programming was in Ruby only. Editing a file is as simple as: sops deployment_secrets/sensitive/production.yml Testing We built a series of validations into sopsorific to further enforce our opinions about secrets management. To learn more about engineering at Betterment, visit the engineering page on the Betterment Resource Center. How we managed to actually execute on this will become clearer in the next section, but for the sake of hand-wavy-expediency, we have a way to run a few commands and distribute CI changes to every project in a matter of minutes. 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. There is still one single point of failure left in our Airflow architecture though: the scheduler. The unlimited supply of iced coffee. Historically, the team has written code mostly in a research environment, implementing proof-of-concept models that are later translated into production code with help from the engineering team. Algorithm Interviews. But we do believe strongly that theres more to agree about than our industry has been able to establish so far. Opens the Fishbowl by Glassdoor site in a new window. 2. The view (the structure): a familiar html.erb file that looks very similar to what would exist without a component but a little more flexible since it doesnt have its content hard coded in. Now lets try running Betterment/AuthorizationInController on the AttachmentLink example from earlier: $ rubocop app/controllers/documents/attachments_controller.rb Inspecting 1 file C Offenses: app/controllers/documents/attachments_controller.rb:3:24: C: Betterment/AuthorizationInController: Model created/updated using unsafe parameters. At a high level, these cops track user input (via params.permit et al.) In short its a sloppy feature spec. 30 min recruiter screen - talk about your experience and why you are a good fit More on shared examples in the section below. This kind of scaffolding allowed us to go in and out of the current platform to capture and store precise inputs and outputs, while isolating them away from any unnecessary stuff that wasnt relevant to the core trading processes. But the era of the spreadsheet is over. Write unit tests for a piece of the method, then refactor that piece. Before I began my internship, I had never worked on a Web app before. Well dive more into system spec best practices in a future blog post. In that case, your request spec becomes like your system spec, and you should assert that the response body is correct for important use cases. I applied online. As we've grown, we've had to push at the limits of what a database-backed queue can accomplish.
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