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. We have big dreams for the future of this platform with more and more engineers using our product. Its definitely the case that a team might not be at the level of operational maturity where defining product or user-specific service level objectives is in the cards. As such, our technical interviews switched from whiteboards to computers. As a computer science major, school has taught me how to code in Java, and maybe some of the theoretical stuff that Ive had drilled into my head will come in handy at some point in my life. https://www.youtube.com/embed/F32QhaHFn1k. 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. After spirited internal discussions we landed on a simple principle: We should provide candidates the most natural setting possible to demonstrate their abilities. The hardware feature of the Secure Enclave included on iPhones since the 5S make for a readilytrustworthy connection to the device and its operating system. Engineering the Trading Platform: Inside Betterments Portfolio Optimization To complete the portfolio optimization, Betterment engineers needed enhance the code in our existing trading platform. pointers to more complex objects), youll need to take care to ensure the memory containing the data youre passing back isnt cleared by the Julia garbage collector prior to being read on the Ruby side. 1. Lots of STAR method and cultural fit questions. Copyright 2008-2023, Glassdoor, Inc. "Glassdoor" and logo are registered trademarks of Glassdoor, Inc. 2. We like it because its easy to introduce to a codebase, violations break builds in clear and actionable ways, and disabling specific checks requires engineers to comment their code in a way that makes it easy to surface during code review. Addition information Since we introduced our internal Rails component code, a fantastic open-source project emerged,Komponent, as well as a really great and in-depth blog post on component systems in Rails fromEvil Martians. The novelty of our approach was to essentially build partial, precise scaffolding around our current platform. It starts with our users - Betterment users - and trying to provide them with a certain quality of service. Its no small feat, but we do it by empowering our teams to set goals, own projects, advocate for features, and challenge the status quo of both our industry and our way of thinking. Using our new platform to build and test code would allow our engineers to receive automated feedback sooner so they could iterate faster. 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. There are repos, each repo has one or more projects of any type. Free interview details posted anonymously by Betterment interview candidates. Normally, running this Monte Carlo would have taken nearly a full year to complete on a single computer, but we created a far more nimble system by piecing together a number of existing technologies. The Nitty Gritty Details In order to describe how our integration tests work, let's start by describing an example app that we may want to test. Explain previous projects . Shoeib Mahmud Shargo - Software QA Engineer - LinkedIn As an added bonus, since our CI process itself was defined in code, if we ever need to switch platforms again, it would be much easier. Dont persist a model unless you have to. Sheesh, thats a mouthful. This leads to less test setup and fewer tests per model to establish confidence that the code is behaving as expected. 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. They should generally give you confidence that a particular model will do exactly what you intended it to do across a range of possible circumstances. 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. Decisions, decisions While researching our options, we happened upon a tool calledsops. We can do this migration in small pieces. Following their apprenticeship, they joined us as full-time Junior Engineers. This gives us a class in a conventional location that inherits from WebValve::FakeService. The result would let us offer a permanent home for our retirement advice that would be always on for our end customers. Dont get swallowed by a faceless engineering org. That meant no guaranteed connection to a cloud service mesh. My assignment was to give everyone in the office a visual snapshot of how the company is doing. Here's what our API looks like and how we use it to set up a fake HTTP client for our tests. In this video, I conduct a mock Google coding interview with a normal software engineer, Keerti Purswani, who's a software developer based in India. Being that Java only covered a small piece of this structure, I had a lot of languages to learn. Most teams need to deploy to multiple environments: production, staging, feature branches, sales demos, etc. 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. For this reason, if you do write characterization tests, we recommend not going too far with them. Key handling and authorization policy design is tricky to get right and sops doesnt do it all for us. We knew that a star schema approach would help us clarify a data narrative and give all of us a consistent view of truth. I identified the most visible spots where we address a user and changed them, but for less visible changes I took this new map and delegated cross-squad ownership of each usage. And these job execution guarantees arent the only area where a background queue might fail to be resilient. 3 step process for me: This test would go on to have a few more steps detailing the interactions on the subsequent screens. The end result: a completely fresh set of views and a new brand were excited to share with the world at large. So does the delayed approach scale? If we attempted to deploy this code, RuboCop would fail the build, preventing the code from going out while letting reviewers know exactly why. Heres how we did it. Easy and comprehensive testing. The problem with this is that whenraworhtmlsafeare used to mark content as already safe by putting it in aSafeBufferas is,safejoinwill not actually do anything additional to escape the content. These include authentication, view rendering, selecting an http response code, redirecting, and setting cookies. This lets us distribute changes across the org quickly. Perhaps it is time to dedicate a sprint or two to understanding whats causing degradation of service. I interviewed at Betterment (New York, NY) in Jan 2021. In the near term, look for smaller pieces of the analytical workflow which would benefit especially from the efficiencies of reproducible, programmatic analysis and reporting. To answer that question, Ill leave you with one last takeaway. We offer a competitive equity package, health, dental and vision benefits, and a 401 (k) offering with employer match as well as flexible PTO policy. Those interviewers dont fill out a scorecard, and our hiring managers are forbidden from discussing candidates with them. Theres so many things I would love to list here. However, as our data model changed, pieces of the trading system also had to change to account for the new structure. Specifically, we wanted a tight feedback loop between the business and technology so that we could experiment and figure out what worked before committing real dollars to a solutionaka high-frequency hypothesis testing. polling a database) can run on higher concurrency per CPU core to save overall resources. Another change is that the entire onsite interview is completed in a single day. SLOs in code Now that we have our metrics flowing, our engineers can define SLOs. Also, we are providing the constraints as tuple of dictionaries. Heres simple way to resolve our bug: Now before we create a new AttachmentLink, we verify that the attachment_id specified actually belongs to the user and our code will raise a 404 otherwise - perfect! We store fake responses with a URI template, a status code, and a body. 6 more interviews with other potential team members. During our testing, we ran over 200,000 simulations of 12 daily level returns of our 12 asset classes for 20 year's worth of returns. I had a very pleasant experience interviewing with the team at Betterment. If I do the same in SAS, only people willing to spend $10,000 (or more if particular modules are required) can review or extend the project. Heres an example configuration section for a single job, the linter job for our Coach repository: https://gist.github.com/agirlnamedsophia/4b4a11acbe5a78022ecba62cb99aa85a And heres an example of the Ruby code that helps generate that result: https://gist.github.com/agirlnamedsophia/a96f3a79239988298207b7ec72e2ed04 For each job that is defined in the.circleci/config.ymlfile, according to the project types list of acceptance criteria, we include additional steps to handle notifications and test reporting. "trust-root chaining"), and then pass the resulting object into your model instead of the unsafe parameter. To learn more about engineering at Betterment, visit the engineering page on the Betterment Resource Center. Abletocarry15.0pounds. The entire process was a month long. Then Kramer. To ensure true randomness, always pass random as the seed. Changing workflows and acquiring new skills is always an investment, but the dividends here are better collaboration, efficient iteration, transparency in process and confidence in the claims and recommendations you make. Versionable Code versioning frameworks, such as git, are now a staple in the workflow of most technical teams. Opens the Fishbowl by Glassdoor site in a new window. Interviews at Betterment Experience Positive 56% Negative 28% Neutral 17% Getting an Interview Applied online 81% Recruiter 6% Employee Referral 6% Difficulty 2.9 Average Hard Average Easy Interviews for Top Jobs at Betterment Software Engineer (18) Customer Experience Associate (8) Product Designer (4) Product Manager (4) He gave several KTs necessary for the tasks to be done. 4.0availableacrossallstores. This is the second part of a series of posts about our new CI/CD platform,Coach. 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 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. Now, back to the future These are just the first few bootstrapping steps. To help us with that, we took things a step further and wrote a wrapper around sops we call sopsorific. When pursuing this ourselves, we found it valuable to evaluate our testing strategy deficits, identify clear-cut boundaries around what code we wanted to test, and establish standards around what flows through the app should be tested. It is bootstrapped (sampled in chunks) to help generate potential futures. What resource is the authenticated user operating on? The process took 1 week. In other words, every job we attempt to enqueue must, eventually, reach some form of resolution. We run millions of these so-called background jobs daily using a SQL-backed queuenot Redis, or RabbitMQ, or Kafka, or, um, you get the pointand weve very intentionally made this choice, for reasons that will soon be explained! Were working to become the most-loved financial services company of a generation, and it starts with our engineers. Some ecosystems are ephemeral and some are durable, but there is only one true production ecosystem holding sensitive PII (Personally Identifiable Information) and that ecosystem must be held to a higher standard of access control than all others. Before my internship, finance, to me, was a field in which some of my peers would work more hours than I had hours of consciousness. Get started with your Free Employer Profile. How We Modeled the Problem The fundamental questions the engineering team tried to answer were: How do we get our customers to this optimal state, and how do we maintain it in the presence of daily account activity? I have always been interested in technology. Sometimes its not in our best interest to be too focused on performance, and we can instead use up our error budget by rolling out some new A/B test, or upgrading a library weve been putting off for a while, or testing out a new language in a user-facing component that we might not otherwise have had the chance to explore. 3. Legacy workloads that are complex and underperforming can now be transitioned over to the data warehouse schema incrementally. Knowing this, we decided to focus on happy paths of flows. The Evolution of the Betterment Engineering Interview Aug 2, 2016 12:00:00 AM Betterments engineering interview now includes a pair programming experience where candidates are tested on their collaboration and technical skills. How it works now Now that we knowwhocan do what, lets talk abouthow they can do what they can do. My interactions with technology prior to learning about programming had always been as a consumer. We usedRails partialsin an effort to keep the code DRY (Dont Repeat Yourself) while sharing the same chunks of code and that got us pretty far, but it had its limitations. 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. So lets take our feature spec. 2. This page is operated and maintained by Betterment Holdings Inc. and it is not associated with Betterment LLC or MTG LLC. Such linked websites are not monitored, investigated, or checked for accuracy or completeness by Betterment. Have we violated our error budget every month for the past three months? Before we dive into how we built it, lets revisit our requirements from above: Easily runnable in CI upon each commit An API that would be familiar to developers who are used to writing flutter screen tests The ability to test the integration between features within the system without needing to set up the entire app. Straightforward tests are easy to write, read, and maintain. Building out the user interface. Then George. Other Improvements We also streamlined our question-asking process and hiring timeline, and added an opportunity for candidates to speak with non-interviewers. We didnt want to store the JSON in a MySQL database, because managing it would be unnecessary overhead for this purpose. Google Coding Interview With A Normal Software Engineer Think of something like Heroku, but for engineers here at Betterment. Our server then gets an AJAX rest request as usual, but instead of rendering the data as JSON, it responds to the request with a snippet of JavaScript. However, in modern versions of Rails, that has changed. How is pay, wlb & work culture. At Betterment, staying compliant with regulators, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, is a part of everyday life. Whats the best way to have a lack of compensation and incentive conversation in your department? We wanted to have a test harness that we could use to set up the app under test and the world that the app would run in, however we knew this configuration code would be mildly complicated and something that would be in flux. Our final allocations are therefore [38271, 43210, 24691, 17284]. Heres the optimal solution: Managing Engineering Complexity Reaching the optimal balances would require our system to buy and sell securities in Joes investment accounts. They had a few questions for me at the end and whiles i was talking they cut me off and said "bye" and just ended the call. You will need to be passingly familiar with the language they're using. The process took 2 weeks. How does it work? But, there will also be times when we're running in a local development environment and we want to communicate with a real collaborator service to do some true integration testing. How We Built Betterment's Retirement Planning Tool in R and JavaScript Engineering Betterments new retirement planning tool meant finding a way to translate financial simulations into a delightful Web experience. All return examples and return figures mentioned above are for illustrative purposes only. The client needs to know almost nothing. (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. It was clear this part of the interviewing process needed to go. In either case, Julia is usually able to generate performant compiled code that we can run in production. Here's a peek inside of the Charlatan API. 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. We made a good effort to understand it. They say multiple times that you can come into this job not knowing any rails, and that the interviewers will be accommodating of your background, this is a quarter true. When we make improvements to one project types base configuration, we can flip a switch and turn it on foreveryone in the org at once. For our customers, it should result in better expected, risk-adjusted returns for investments. A Win for Customers and Engineering Building RetireGuidefrom R to JavaScripthelped reinforce the fact that no engineering principle is correct in all cases. Everyone was really nice and thoughtful and genuinely wanted to know about me. That means, x=[a1,a2,,a7,b1,b2d7]. Jesse Harrelson: I was born and raised in Wyoming and spent a lot of time exploring the outdoors. . 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. Its a spectrum. assuming a secret-editor role The sops command will open and decrypt the secrets in their editor and, if changed, encrypt them and save them back to the files original location. I have experience in several different backend/ frontend frameworks, yet rails has some specific quirks, and your interviewers will not help you in this regard, but will simply try to see how you figure out, so they basically force you to google mid interview, and set you on a timer. Each consists of some action being taken for / by / on behalf of / in the interest of one or more of our customers, and that must be completed within an appropriate amount of time. Sr. Software Engineer - Backend Job in New York, NY at Betterment System specs were added to Rails 5.1 core and it is the core teams preferred way to test client-side interactions. Back to the bigger picture Integration testing in flutter can be daunting due to how heavy the flutter_driver/integration_test solutions are with their UI testing strategies. 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. Next well explore in more detail some of our design choices regarding the content of our messages and the rate at which we send them. Pact's docs encourage these human conversations, but as a tool it doesn't require them. Overall, I got the impression their interview process is very focused on cultural fit and enthusiasm for the product more than anything else. App owners have permissions to assume the secret-editor role for sensitive ecosystems of their specific application. The unlimited supply of iced coffee. 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. At Betterment, instead of picking pounds of ingredients from a given store, we are using it to piece together a mix of securities, in order to keep us compliant with certain regulatory specifications. It is a read-only, star-schema representation of fact and dimensional tables for growth subject areas. Suraj Prasad. Finally, we sort our buckets in descending remainder order (because the buckets with the highest remainders are most deserving of extra pennies) and allocate the leftover pennies we have in this order. It's a joke feed, but they have some great tech and security points and articles shared there. But the era of the spreadsheet is over. Being surrounded by a bunch of smart, helpful people has also been super amazing and helped me grow as an engineer. Very pleasant and friendly experience. Ask Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, two Harvard economists who published an influential paper on sovereign debt and economic growth, only to find out that the results rested in part on the accidental omission of five cells from an average. For Betterment, this means working to build a company of passionate individuals who reflect our customers and bring new and different perspectives to our work. Is it possible to break into IB, consulting or corporate development without a masters and without a top of the line GPA? Walk me through your design process (in general and part of portfolio). If we need to change our brand colors, lets say, we can just change the CSS in Style Closet instead of scraping our codebase and making sure we catch it everywhere. Fidel Severino: The opportunity to join Betterments Apprenticeship program came via the Flatiron School. Key Principles for Using Tax Coordination on a Retirement Goal As a result, we wanted to make sure that the software we built respected four key principles, which are: Isolation from third-party solver APIs. We quickly realized it was too much. These are some of the most popular tools in each language organized by their layer in your full-stack analysis workflow: Full Stack Analysis R Python Environment RStudio iPython / Jupyter, PyCharm Sourcing Data RMySQL, rpostgresql, rvest, RCurl, httr MySQLdb,requests, bs4 Cleaning, Reshaping and Summarizing data.table, dplyr pandas Analysis, Model Building, Learning see CRAN Task Views NumPy, SciPy, Statsmodels, Scikit-learn Visualization ggplot2, ggvis, rCharts matplotlib, d3py, Bokeh Reporting RMarkdown, knitr, shiny, rpubs IPython notebook Sourcing Data If there is any ambiguity in this step, the whole analysis stack can collapse on the foundation. . Putting this process in code keeps everyone accountable and removes ambiguity about how the final analysis set was reached. start on starting web-app stop on stopping web-app respawn exec su -s /bin/bash -l -c '\ cd /var/www/web-app; \ exec "$0" "$@"' web-app-owner -- sopsorific run 'bundle exec puma -C config/puma.rb' >> /var/log/upstart.log 2>&1 >Operations The 12-factor app methodology reminds us that sometimes developers need to be able to run one-off admin tasks by starting up a console on a live running server. By hosting meetups for Women Who Code, a non-profit organization that empowers women through technology, were working to engage this community directly. 9.830lbsoffoodfromElaine's. This looks very similar to a Sinatra app, and that's because it is onewith some additional magic baked in. In order to do this, we built out a fake http client that allows us to configure network responses for given requests. Learn more about engineering jobs and our culture. As our team has grown impressively from five to more than 50 engineers (and this was just in the last three years), weve significantly improved our abilities to make clearer hiring decisions, as well as shortened our total hiring timeline. Constraints One thing to note is that for the packages were using, constraints only deal with ineq and eq where ineq means greater than. We recently put some code into production that uses an optimizer to cut down on the amount of code were maintaining ourselves, and it turned out to be pretty darn cool. We created a variant for our rebrand, which would be exposed based on the status of our new feature flag. All of it is kept together with frameworks that allow the different pieces to communicate with each other, and there are servers that the app needs to run on.This was extremely eye-opening for me, and Im so glad that the engineers at Betterment spent time during my first week getting me up to speed on all of it. At Betterment, we define CD as the process of making every small change to our system shippable as soon as its been built and tested. But we do believe strongly that theres more to agree about than our industry has been able to establish so far. Each file with detailed asset allocation, tax, trading and returns information was archived inexpensively in the cloud. Within the boundaries of that principle, we considered multiple interview formats, including take-home and online assessments, and several variations of pair programming interviews. This makes the tests run faster, and removes the need for having any special tables that dont get cleaned out. Betterment Staff Software Engineer Interview Questions The complexity partly arose from the fact that we needed to duplicate business logic from the backend and the frontend. I went above and beyond for years doing extra work, organizations etc and nothing has been reflected in pay. At a high level, these cops track user input (via params.permit et al.) Yuck! Our Principles in Action: Standardizing the Interface At Betterment, we want to empower our engineers to do their best work. We love the idea of these tests, the level of confidence they'd give us that our app works as intended, and how they'd eliminate manual QA testing, but we loathe the cost of running them, both in terms of time and actual $$$ of CI execution. This informs the user that the application should work with Face ID but may do so imperfectly. Anonymous Interview Candidate in New York, NY, The process took 1 week. Building for Better: Gender Inclusion at Betterment Betterment sits at the intersection of two industries with large, historical gender gaps. Sometimes there are a few layers of indirection between a service and a Betterment customer, and it takes a bit of creativity to understand what aspects of the service directly affects them. To find a solution, we drew inspiration fromthe component approachused by modern design systems and JavaScript frameworks. What did change, however, was how each transaction type was translated into trading activity, which is what we wanted to test exhaustively. This means we must continuously iterate on our recruiting process to remain competitive in attracting and hiring top talent. Our CLI and the accompanying conventions make that possible. Maintaining a Data Dictionary wiki became a part of our Definition of Done. Inform the roadmap Within three weeks of operations, it became clear that we could use turn-around time metrics from ad-hoc or advisory requests to inform us where we need to invest in project cycles and technology. Interview questions for java software engineer designed for both interviewers and candidates, valuable advice on how to prepare for interviews, develop effective questioning strategies, and answer tricky questions with confidence. That JavaScript gets evaluated by the browser. Friction here refers to ambiguity of CI results and the uncertainty of knowing where your code is in the CI/CD process. Whats the best way to have a lack of compensation and incentive conversation in your department? Relevant ecosystem. Each machine pulls a simulation: Thanks the the maturation of modern message queues it is more advantageous and simple to orchestrate jobs in a pull-based fashion, than the old push system, as we mentioned above. Your interview is no different. The remaining test harness code was put in our normal codebase where it can be iterated on freely.