Regardless, given that it has the same problems that flutter_driver does, we decided not to pursue integration_test as our framework. For APIs that we build for ourselves (e.g. But I soon realized it was just the opposite: Knowing less about finance motivated me to learnquickly. First proposed by Michael Feathers (who wrote the bible on working with legacy code) these tests simply take a set of verified inputs/outputs from the existing production legacy code and then assert that the output of the new code is the same as the legacy code under the same inputs. For example, an engineer on a backend or data-engineering team provides services that a user-facing component consumes indirectly. While we encourage candidates to ask questions of everyone they meet, the AMA provides an opportunity to meet with a Betterment engineer who has zero input on whether or not to hire them. This light coat of paint was applied to our production layer, so any experience that couldnt be fully redesigned within our timeline would still get a fresh header and the fonts and colors that reflected our new brand. It was built out over the past few years, with many different paradigms and patterns. I thought my 5 year was going to finally show something but it did not. 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. Our principles derive from and are matched to Betterments collective experience and context. Relieving Launch Day Stress with Feature Flags Embarking on this rebrand project, we wanted to keep our designs under wrap until launch day. A little bit of disclaimer here before we start digging in a little more: I can barely scratch the surface of how solvers work. Pair programming to solve design problems, discussing team, meeting with different members of the team (mostly other engineers, but also PMs, and a couple of VPs). - Phone screen, nice recruiter. Tax efficiency is a key consideration of Betterments portfolio management philosophy. the application or models in question dont have a concept of private data The flagged code isnt actually insecure: e.g. In person pair programming was in Ruby only. Enabling preferred first names moves us towards a more inclusive product. 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. Similarly, the sum of the balances of every fund in his Roth IRA must remain at $5,500. Because this was entry level, experience with specific languages were not required and interviewers were very helpful with syntax as long as you knew what steps were needed to solve the problem. Why dont we use Feature Specs? iOS or Android? The complexity partly arose from the fact that we needed to duplicate business logic from the backend and the frontend. Betterment Software Engineer Mobile IOS Interview Questions That said, we still relied heavily on the manual testing checklist to ensure the user experience was as expected. Face ID permissions prompt without (left) and with (right) an NSFaceIDUsageDescription string included in the Info.plist This compatibility mode prompt is undesirable enough on its own, but it also clued us into the need to check for potential security concerns opened up by this forwards-compatibility-by-default from Apple. Then, a group of engineers from each squad began tackling each deprecation one by one. 3. So lets take our feature spec. 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. Given requirements and interface, provide an implementation Popular Generators . We leveraged ActionPack variants built into Rails and feature flags from TestTrack in new ways, ensuring we didnt need to make any architecture changes. We use containers to simulate multiple physical worker machines that connect to officially maintained local Redis and PostgreSQL containers. Instead, we opted to model our problem as a linear program. This is meant as an introduction to using one specific solver as a way to model and solve a problem. You got one notification message when everything succeeded and you still do. 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. Search. I had a blast pair programming with 3 engineers, which Im glad to say are now my co-workers! Certain snappy user experience elements dont work as well without JavaScript. 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. The hiring process at Betterment takes an average of 28 days when considering 99 user submitted interviews across all job titles. Each variable represents the expected value of holding a particular fund in a particular account. It was clear this part of the interviewing process needed to go. When reviewing code, I look for adherence to coding standards, code efficiency, readability, and maintainability. Shh Its a Secret: Managing Secrets at Betterment Opinionated secrets management that helps us sleep at night. Anonymous Interview Candidate in New York, NY, I applied online. New York City: $190,000 - $205,000. This led to maintenance issues, and it made our application harder to test. Switching between third-party solvers simply meant switching implementations of the interface below. 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. Pact's docs encourage these human conversations, but as a tool it doesn't require them. Friction here refers to ambiguity of CI results and the uncertainty of knowing where your code is in the CI/CD process. However, I'm here to tell you (or maybe just remind you) that tests and test coverage aren't the goal in and of themselves. Betterment is an engineering-driven company that has developed the most-trusted online financial advisor based on the principles of optimization and efficiency. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ 1 file inspected, 1 offense detected The model initialization was flagged because it was seen using create_params, which contains user input. High quality code. 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. The tools to get us there Lets dive into some tooling that the SRE team at Betterment has built to help Betterment engineers easily start to measure things. She gave a talk on impostor syndrome, a psychological phenomenon in which people are unable to internalize their accomplishments. If we arent alerting on those 3 hours of errors, and instead just once if we exceed that limit, then we can direct our attention toward new product features, platform improvements, or learning and development. The on-site interview consisted of three parts: 2 technical interviews, lunch with a "buddy", and then several non-technical interviews with product and engineering leadership. We find that there is a lot of value in structuring a system spec as an intuitively sensible user story - with realistic user motivations and behavior, sometimes including the user making mistakes, correcting them, and ultimately being successful. Dozens of engineers contribute to our biggest repository every day and as the code base and engineering team have grown, the complexity of our CI story has increased and our existing pipeline couldnt keep up. Option 1: Continue Running R Directly Our first plan was to reuse the research code in R and let it continue to run server-side, building an API on top of the core functions. We can click on any of these links and know exactly where they go based on the logoof the service. Examples of projections and recommendations at Betterment. Make a feature or two. Some of the topics that came up were - implementing a http endpoint, writing code to make a rspec pass, active record operations. What resource is the authenticated user operating on? Of course, it may require a bit of tuning on your part, and wed love to hear how it goes! Onboarding new hires familiar with the Rails framework will be faster, and those who arent familiar can find great external (and internal) resources to learn it. straightforward interview process, the Betterment apprenticeship quickly . Of course, job resolution doesnt necessarily mean success. In addition, we knew that as our work on TCP progressed, we were going to need to iterate on our mathematical model. Growing up, I watched my dad work as an electrical engineer. We store fake responses with a URI template, a status code, and a body. Benefits of measuring the right things, and staying on target The goal of an SLO based approach to engineering is to provide data points with which to have a reasonable conversation about priorities (a point that Alex Hidalgo drives home in his book Implementing Service Level Objectives). I applied online. These are REALLY basic things that you can do if you have some rails experience, but if its your first time looking at it, you're SOL, and your interviewers will at best try to nudge you to the right documentation page to read mid interview. I went above and beyond for years doing extra work, organizations etc and nothing has been reflected in pay. For more information about working at Betterment, please visit our Careers page. 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. Ask-me-anything1:1 with an engineer on another team, 3. The process took 1 week. Fidel Severino: While working, I would take any available time for courses on websites like Codecademy and Team Treehouse. On the other hand, shared-nothing teams can lead to information silos, wheel-reinventing, and integration nightmares when an initiative is too big for a squad to deliver alone. This approach puts candidates at ease, and feels closer to typical pair programming than one might expect. 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. Notice the two WebMock stub_requests calls at the top. If we find a match, we return it, if we don't then we throw a helpful exception to guide the developer on how to fix the issue. WebValve The Magic You Need for HTTP Integration Struggling with HTTP integrations locally? 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. The first round of "in person" interviews. Everyone from Betterment is proud of the company and work they have done there, which made my decision not join really difficult. Junior Software Engineer Interview Questions - startup.jobs Take home test was easy and you were allowed to do it in a language of your choosing. Commercial Customer Service Representative. Asked for feedback after the rejection and didn't get any. My advice to candidates, interview with them but dont keep all your eggs in one basket. School has taught me nothing. It does make you feel vulnerable, but it keeps you moving forward. Complete a pair programming exercise consisting of some starter code and finishing out a key function. Whose Twitter feed do you religiously follow? Any features youd like to see added? This gave us the flexibility to switch easily between a variety of third-party mathematical programming solvers. Cleaning up the most looked at metrics helped the organization speak to and understand key data in a consistent manner. 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. 1 Betterment Software Engineering interview questions and 1 interview reviews. Our analytics and data science team at Betterment uses these data best practicesto quickly produce reliable and sophisticated insights to drive product and business decisions. 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. The beginning of our Flutter testing journey Up until early 2020, our mobile app was entirely native with separate android and iOS codebases. But we did things a little differently, which saved us thousands of computing hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars. Sr. Software Engineer - Backend job in New York at Betterment Technical interviewsSeries of pair-programming challenges, 2. 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. Failed after the onsite interview because apparently my tech skills weren't "up to par." Sample questions, not scripts, are provided, and interviewers are encouraged to tailor the competency questions to the candidates based on their backgrounds. If Betterment has a relationship or affiliation with the author or content, it will note this in additional disclosure. Say that we want to start by testing the profile edit flow. Failure to do so could mean anything from creating a minor inconvenience to blocking trades from executing. chicken:2.000lbs(2.0instock) carrots:3.501lbs(5.0instock) thyme:3.017lbs(16.0instock) onions:4.568lbs(10.0instock) noodles:0.000lbs(3.0instock) garlic:0.435lbs(1.0instock) parsley:0.435lbs(2.0instock) 8.632lbsoffoodfromNewman's. The most significant engineering challenge in building RetireGuide was turning a complex, research-driven financial model into a personalized Web application. We captured a mass of user transaction objects from production for use in testing. It is a read-write schema to which our colleagues have full privileges. What to say when thingsfail This is what engineers would see in the Old World when tests failed for an open pull request: Among other deficiencies, theres only one link and it takes us to a Jenkins job. Straightforward tests are easy to write, read, and maintain. We valued the ability to encrypt just the secret values themselves and leave the variable name in plain-text. Next up was optimizing our portfolio management algorithms, which manage cashflows, rebalances, and tax exposures. I applied online. In our new roles, we are now informing and guiding many of the ongoing product and marketing efforts at Betterment. To incorporate a third-party solver into our system, we built a translation layer that received our system-generated constraints and objective function as inputs, and utilized those inputs to solve the model using a third-party API. More precisely, when we make use of database transactions (which, when we use ActiveRecord, we assuredly do whether we realize it or not), a database-backed queue will ensure that enqueued jobs will either commit or roll back with the rest of our ActiveRecord-based changes. The first round of "in person" interviews. The process took 2 days. The challenge becomes: how do we replicate the integration environment without the integration environment? What would you say has been the most rewarding part of your experience so far? Our initial task was to interview internal stakeholders to get at their data-related pain points. In this post, Ill share how we solved the problem by leaning on functional programming to allocate money precisely across proportional buckets. 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. Colorado: $175,000 - $190,000. Free interview details posted anonymously by Betterment interview candidates. Here's how we did it. Another disappointment we had with the old messaging was that it didnt make us feel very good when our tests passed. Took about an hour or two total. Since these contexts change, we found ourselves either altering the partials or copying and pasting their code into new views where additional context-specific code could be added. This includes validations, instance and class method inputs and outputs, Active Record callbacks, and other model behaviors. 2021 Betterment Holdings Inc. Having a tool to protect ourselves from ourselves is vital to our workflow. Ive inquired about pay but its gotten nowhere. We are hoping that by using these patterns, we can limit our use of JavaScript to only know about how to enhance HTML, not how toautomatically calculate net income when trying to distribute excess tax year contributions from an IRA (something that our frontend JavaScript used to know how to do). Its worth it. But I really liked how "organic" these problems were since I got a sense of the actual challenges I would be facing as well as the tools and practices used by the team. The umbrella term observability covers all manner of subjects, from basic telemetry to logging, to making claims about longer-term performance in the shape of service level objectives (SLOs) and occasionally service level agreements (SLAs). As we've grown, we've had to push at the limits of what a database-backed queue can accomplish. Work with nonprofits: Groups like NCWIT, the YWCA, the Anita Borg Institute, the Scientista Foundation, and several others are so great for community outreach and company morale. Not quite. Then we flesh out that fake route by scooping out our json from the test file and probably making it a little more dynamic when we drop it into the fake. If embedding your Julia library into a multi-threaded application, youll need additional tooling to only initialize and make calls into the Julia library from a single thread, as multiple calls to `jl_init`will error. Free interview details posted anonymously by Betterment interview candidates. Lets say that each account holds $50,000, for a total of $150,000 in investments. The SLO is the target percentage, 99.9%. How did we doit? We implemented a local fallback mixin for Airflow maintained hooks that uses the local filesystem for development and testing, deferring to the actual hooks remote functionality only on production. To implement our component system, we created our internal gem, Style Closet. To migrate to Airflow, were deprecating our Luigi solution on two fronts: cross-database replication and task orchestration. 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. Determination of most trusted online financial advisor reflects Betterment LLC's distinction of having the most customers in the industry, made in reliance on customer counts, self-reported pursuant to SEC rules, across all online-only registered investment advisors. No whiteboards. The process took 3 weeks. We found just a few hardware type queues to be effective. Betterment Lead Software Engineer Interview Questions This means that we have to also inject fake implementations of any plugins we use. The circles represent various asset classes, and the bar shows the allocation for all the accounts, if added together. 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. Weve gotten such an enthusiastic response about designing future events around issues that women (and everyone!) 1. I was part of the Core CRM Team. If we dont escape content properly, we could open ourselves and our customers up to security risks. According to Caitlin Tudor-Savin, HR Business Partner, This is more than a check-the-box activity, more than a one-off meeting with an attendance sheet. In this post, well dive into some of the engineering that took place to build RetireGuide and our strategy for building an accurate, responsive, and easy-to-use advice tool that implements sophisticated financial calculations. Whats the best way to have a lack of compensation and incentive conversation in your department? That said, we recognize the attractive properties of the more well-trodden Option 1 path and believe it could be the right solution in a lot of scenarios (and may become the right solution for us as our usage of Julia continues to evolve). We identified two viable alternatives: Build a thin web service that will accept HTTP requests, call the underlying Julia functions, and then return a HTTP response. 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? Below is a model spec skeleton with some common test cases: System Specs System specs are like integration tests. 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. Scalable There are hard technical limits to how large an analysis you can do in a spreadsheet. Transitioning from Luigi toAirflow Our single-server approach usedLuigi, a Python module created to orchestrate long-running batch jobs with dependencies. In this case, our second test is relying on the side effects of the first test. It also showed how an asset allocation would perform over the lifetime of an investment. Another big resilience failure happens far earlier, during the enqueue step. Using UJS patterns, our view can live completely on the server. This meant there was minimal test environment setup. (Were also assuming he only wants to make at most one visit to each store.) How it works now Now that we knowwhocan do what, lets talk abouthow they can do what they can do. Theres so many things I would love to list here. This also fosters conversation, natural networking, and the chance for women to get their foot in the door. While there are plenty of metaphors and ways to define legacy code, it has this common feature: Its always tricky to work with it. All of the above! No algorithmic brain teasers. Julia solves this issue by making it very simple to take a piece of research code and refactor it for production use. I also pay attention to the use of appropriate design patterns and algorithms . Understanding these tradeoffs is what helped our Engineering team at Betterment decide on a solution that made the most sense for our applications. 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. At Betterment, we rely on said jobs extensively, to limit the amount of work performed during the critical path of each web request, and also to perform scheduled tasks at regular intervals. First, I needed to provide a translation of my own understanding of legal first names and preferred first names to our codebase. Weve usedUJSsprinkles in similar fashion to the rest of the Rails world over the years, but that has its limitations as we begin to design more complex behaviors and elements of our apps. I interviewed at Betterment (New York, NY) in Jun 2019. The interview was centered around how well you communicate,work with others, and problem solve. 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. The structure of a Web app is a lot more complex than what the user sees on the page. Thankfully, the changes to the Local Authentication framework were done in such a way that we determined there wasnt a security risk, but it did leave a problematic user experience in reaching a potentially-inescapable screen when selecting Dont Allow on the privacy permission prompt. This is the slightly nicer part of SLOs versus simple monitors - we arent going to be pinged for every latency failure or error rate spike. Here are a few notes for practitioners about some nuanced issues we ran into, that will hopefully save you some headaches down the line: The Julia runtime has to be initialized before calling the shared library. 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. Opens the Fishbowl by Glassdoor site in a new window. Now, updating CI requires opening a PR to make the change. We use a little command line utility to assume the role and are dropped into a secret-editor session where they use sops to add or edit secrets with their editor in the same way they add or edit code in a feature branch. "trust-root chaining"), and then pass the resulting object into your model instead of the unsafe parameter. But we do believe strongly that theres more to agree about than our industry has been able to establish so far. SLOs in code Now that we have our metrics flowing, our engineers can define SLOs. On a related note, the entire company has a collaborative culture that is contagious. We wanted to highlight metrics such as net deposits, assets under management, and conversions from visitors to the site into Betterment customers. Being surrounded by a bunch of smart, helpful people has also been super amazing and helped me grow as an engineer. App owners have permissions to assume the secret-editor role for sensitive ecosystems of their specific application. Also note, do not get your hopes up if you get a personal call from your recruiter after the final interview. It couldnt scale out to the rest of the org with ease. We've also created an extension method withDefaults that allows us to configure a bunch of common, default responses so that we don't have to specify those in each and every test case. Everyone was very open about what they thought about the company and about what their experience at the company was like. 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). I applied online. The next thing we needed to decide was what user experiences we actually wanted to test with our integration tests. Sops encrypts and decrypts your secret values using your cloud providers Key Management Service (AWS KMS, GCP KMS, Azure Key Vault) and PGP as a backup in the event those services are not available. This is just one more example of where our quest for efficiencyand your happinesspaid off. And then youll probably want to expose a way for Ruby to instruct Julia to clean up that reference (i.e. Dan Kubb's email & phone number - Senior Staff Software Engineer at Engineers and designers can be confident theyre using something thats been tested and validated across browsers. CSS (the appearance): In this example, we use it to set things like the color, alignment and the border. The need for new elements in our views is not going to simply vanish because we rebranded, so this makes us more prepared for the future. 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.