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. 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. Flutter provides good solutions for both screen testing and UI testing, but what about the middle-ground? 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. There were aspects of the page elements (our shared chunks) that needed to change based on their context or the page where they were being rendered. Our team could then use TestTracks browser plugin to preview and QA the new views along the way. I applied through a recruiter. Method to the Madness The crux of our new pattern is this: We use Rails unobtrusive JavaScript (ujs) library to declare that forms and links should be submitted using AJAX. As a Rails shop, we already make heavy use of RuboCop. Cleaning up the most looked at metrics helped the organization speak to and understand key data in a consistent manner. We still lacked a good way to share markup across all our apps. Rule #2: Controllers should pass ActiveRecord models, rather than ids, into the model layer. Find a Great First Job to Jumpstart Your Career, Stand Out From the Crowd With the Perfect Cover Letter, How to Prepare for Your Interview and Land the Job. 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 found just a few hardware type queues to be effective. A Ruby class (the behavior aside from any JavaScript): the class holds the props the component allows to be passed in as well as any methods needed for the view, similar to a presenter model. The one additional advantage of integration_test is that it uses the same API as screen tests do, so writing tests with it feels more familiar for developers experienced with writing screen tests. We recently re-optimized our portfolio to include more complex asset allocations and risk models (and it will soon be available). -> % coach create project --type ruby_app 'coach.yml' configuration file added -- update it based on your project's needs When you run that, the CLI creates the smallcoach.ymlconfiguration definition file discussed earlier. Additionally, all components can take a block, which is typically the content for the component. One challenge we have that most existing iOS apps share is the need to still support older iOS versions. Not only was this frustrating, but it was inefficient. This was essentially a map for us engineers to be able to reference and go update those old usages in our codebase whenever we wanted. This lets us distribute changes across the org quickly. For example, they think theyre frauds, or unqualified for their jobs, regardless of their achievements. (For the record, they stand for The Depository Trust Company, Committee on Uniform Security Identification Procedures, and Automated Customer Account Transfer Service, respectively.) Given requirements, explain how one may model some data. Heres how our interview process once looked: While this process helped in growing our engineering team, it began showing some cracks along the way. The last straw for using whiteboards came from feedback provided by Betterments Women in Technology group. 4. 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. Has there been an increase in Customer Service requests to resolve problems related to this specific aspect of our service? 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? free the memory) when its done with it (Ruby-FFI has good support for triggering a callback when an object goes out-of-scope on the Ruby side). There are also feasibility limits. Ive always had a curious mind. Opens the Fishbowl by Glassdoor site in a new window, Get started with your Free Employer Profile, The Ultimate Job Interview Preparation Guide. Each project needs to be built, tested, and linted. The process took 2 weeks. Testing our Rails applications allows us to build features more quickly and confidently by proving that code does what we think it should, catching regression bugs, and serving as documentation for our code. Betterment Lead Software Engineer Interview Questions Something you did or suggest that would help the team or companies efficiency. In addition to problems arising from the types of questions asked, we saw that one of our primary interview tools, the whiteboard, was actually getting in the way; many candidates struggled to communicate their solutions using a whiteboard in an interview setting. For this reason, if you do write characterization tests, we recommend not going too far with them. To solve this programmatically, we adoptedAlembicdatabase migrations to manage these objects through code, allowing us to keep our development, testing, and production Airflow databases consistent. Here's how we did it. provided they know or can guess its ID - not great! Now, back to the future These are just the first few bootstrapping steps. When before it could take days or weeks to add a new step to a CI pipeline, now it takes hours of simple code review. chicken:3.000lbs(3.0instock) carrots:0.632lbs(2.0instock) thyme:0.000lbs(6.0instock) onions:0.000lbs(4.0instock) noodles:5.000lbs(9.0instock) garlic:0.000lbs(0.0instock) parsley:0.000lbs(1.0instock) 16.000lbsofchicken. This Is How You Bootstrap a Data Team Data alone is not enoughwe needed the right storytellers. Process consisted of a phone screening with a recruiter, online tech assessment, and 2 video call interviews. Sr. Software Engineer - Backend (Remote) - Betterment | Built In Julia also has a very rich type system where researchers can build prototypes without type declarations, and then later refactoring the code where needed with type declarations for dispatch or clarity. Soon we were solving for our acceptance criteria requirements left and rightthat Java app needs the PMD linter! Late one night, we started bouncing ideas off each other on how to pull it off. If there is significant conditional behavior in the view layer and you are looking to make your system spec leaner, you may want to extract that conditional behavior to a presenter resource model and test that separately in a model spec so that you dont need to worry about testing it in a system spec. Here you can see how to construct an instance of the Charlatan class and then use its methods like whenGet to configure it with fake responses that we want to see when we make requests to the configured URLs. What did we need? Recently, however, weve invested significant resources in modernizing this research pipeline by converting our codebase from R to Julia and were now able to ship updates to our quantitative models quicker, and with less risk of errors being introduced in translation. Betterment was super supportive and accommodating. Were running Airflows database on AmazonsRelational Database Serviceand using AmazonsElasticachefor Redis queuing. Using UJS patterns, our view can live completely on the server. Jesse Harrelson, a Betterment Software Engineer, not only leads our hosting events, they found a path to Betterment through Women Who Code. Betterment is a leading, technology-driven financial services company that offers investing and retirement solutions for retail investors and investment advisors as well as financial wellness solutions, including a 401 (k) for small and medium-sized businesses. What our Engineers Needed For pull requests, developers would commit code and push it up to GitHub and then eventually they would receive a Slack message that said BAD for every test suite that failed, or GOOD if everything passed, or nothing at all in the case of a Jenkins agent getting stuck and hanging forever. This post was written with Dan Egan. Each file with detailed asset allocation, tax, trading and returns information was archived inexpensively in the cloud. No algorithmic brain teasers. In that case, we would just need to define the secrets that have different values in a separate secrets file likedevintest.ymlbelow wheredevintestis the name of the ecosystem. If you had prior experience with these languages the problems are easy to solve. Certain snappy user experience elements dont work as well without JavaScript. Create an input queue: We created a bucket with every simulationmore than 200,000we wanted to run. Specifically, its that some queues rely on an apps primary database connectionthey are database-backed, against the apps own databasewhereas others rely on a separate datastore, like Redis. Here was a company that wasnt solely focused on the traditional Computer Science education when hiring an apprentice/junior engineer. We can also set a warning threshold if we want to be notified earlier when were using up our error budget. Does not reflect any actual portfolio and is not a guarantee of performance. Say that we want to start by testing the profile edit flow. With a solid plan for gathering user input, we pivoted to the bigger question: Where should we use a customers preferred first name? As we see it, the members of Team Polaris are the bards of a data narrative that help the organization grow while delivering a top-tier product. Jesse Harrelson: I was born and raised in Wyoming and spent a lot of time exploring the outdoors. You are viewing a web property located at Betterment.com. This leads to less test setup and fewer tests per model to establish confidence that the code is behaving as expected. However, you asked for themostrewarding, and I would have to say without a doubtthe mentorship. For each project type we knew we would need to support: Static code analysis Unit tests Integration tests Build steps Test reports We define the specific jobs a project will run during CI by looking at theprojecttypevalue inside a projectscoach.yml. A component is a reusable code building block. But, if Elaine was set up a certain way, we wanted to go back to Jerry and adjust the decisions we made for him. In order to fulfill two of our main requirements: being able to run as part of our normal test suite in CI and having a familiar API, we knew wed need to build our framework on top of flutters existing screen test framework. On Fishbowl, you can share insights and advice anonymously with Betterment employees and get real answers from people on the inside. Personal finance is not something many college students think aboutpartially because its not taught in school and partially because we dont have any money to worry about anyway. To test our algorithms-as-strategies, we simulated the thousands of potential futures they might encounter. Then, with our meticulous notes compiled, it became clear to us that our major challenges lay with the accessibility to and reliability of key performance metrics. Our principles are a living document in an actual git repository that well continue to add to and revise as we learn and grow. These tests are as close to end-to-end tests as we can get without actually running on a real device using flutter_driver. Your answer should include a step-by-step process for designing a back-end system, including any tools or software you might use during the process. Different properties may be provided by a different entity with different marketing standards. He has greatly inspired me with his go-getter attitude and has always . Last fall, Betterment optimized its portfolio, moving from the original platform to an upgraded trading platform that included more asset classes and the ability to weight exposure of each asset class differently for every level of risk. Its a new era with a new scale of data, and its time to define new norms around management of and inferences from business data. To meet these needs, we created Blazer, an extension of the Backbone router. In our app we use dio and not dart:io's built-in HTTP client mostly due to preference and slight feature set differences. Some problems, however, are better solved by taking a functional approach. This new flexible set of asset allocations significantly affects our current trading processes. While many of these tasks merely sent a transactional email, or fired off an iOS or Android push notification, plenty involved the actual movement of moneydeposits, withdrawals, transfers, rollovers, you name itwhile others kept Betterments information systems up-to-datesyncing customers linked account information, logging events to downstream data consumers, the list goes on. It made an optimal user experience possible. Then there are outliers Yet sometimes even the best practices still didnt apply to a piece of legacy code. In the next post of this series on CD, well explore how we committed 5000 line configuration files to our repositories with confidence by standardizing CI for different runtimes, automating config generation in code, and testing that code generation. 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. This is made possible, at least in part, by the ability to perform units of work asynchronously. Today Id like to talk about how we increased consistent adoption of Continuous Integration (CI) across our engineering organization, and why. Ensure the same set of acceptance criteria is in place for all codebases in the org. Ideally, the same tools you build to understand your data when youre at 10 employees should scale and evolve through your IPO. I was part of the Core CRM Team. CI is now a mechanism for instantly sharing the benefits of discovery made in isolated exploration, with everyone. Implementing a local fallback for remote hooks made our code much more testable and easier to work with locally, while still allowing us to run with Airflow-maintained functionality in production. For more information about working at Betterment, please visit our Careers page. We have big dreams for the future of this platform with more and more engineers using our product. Once a new registration event is received, the registry server opens a pull request to the Julia registry. 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. When jobs run, they emit ActiveSupport::Notification events that we subscribe to and then forward along to a StatsD emitter, typically as distribution or increment metrics. This did two things: it took testing off the developers plates early in the process, allowing them to focus on writing production code, and also helped isolate the central objects that required most of their attention. Code Review Our last line of defense is code review. Being that Java only covered a small piece of this structure, I had a lot of languages to learn. Learn more about engineering jobs and our culture. From an applications perspective, this relationship between a biometric scanner and the Secure Enclave is simplified to a boolean response. 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. To find a solution, we drew inspiration fromthe component approachused by modern design systems and JavaScript frameworks. Everyone was really nice and thoughtful and genuinely wanted to know about me. Anonymous Interview Candidate in New York, NY, The process took 1 week. We sent out questionnaires in advance but collected answers through face-to-face dialogue. Just as the Ford Motor Company created efficiency with assembly line production and Pixar opened up new worlds by computerizing animation, companies now are innovating and improving the craft of using data to do business. This can make scheduling difficult, but in a city as competitive as New York is for engineering talent, weve found it valuable to get to the final offer stage as quickly as possible. Centralizing architectural decision-making would kill ownership and autonomy, and ensure your best people leave or never join in the first place. He did a good job explaining the different roles available and listening to my needs without being too pushy. This dedicated MySQL instance consisted of three database schemas we now refer to as our Triumvirate Data Warehouse. We need a frontend template for that view. When working on these cops, we narrowed down false positives to two scenarios: The flagged code could be considered insecure only in other contexts: e.g. They showed me how we were getting quite a few requests from trans customers to quit deadnaming them. We can do this migration in small pieces. The rebrand variant and correlating template file helped us avoid a tangled web of conditionals, and instead boiled down the overhead to a toggle in our ApplicationController. 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. Quite a bit more complicated, because each backend framework provides its own set of trade-offs and guarantees, many of which will have far-reaching implications in our codebase. 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. I interviewed at Betterment (New York, NY) in Jan 2021. With hundreds of constraints and hundreds of thousands of unique tax profiles across our customer base, we needed to be confident that our system made the right decisions in the right situations. Betterment Software Engineer Internal Tools Interview Questions Suffice it to say, crypto will not be the focus of this post. It's a standard test double, and it does the trick. 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. A multi-threaded, SQL-driven ActiveJob backend used at Betterment to process millions of background jobs per day. Whats kept you here? I interviewed at Betterment. The Interview Study Guide For Software Engineers 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. The right hand side of the equation is assumed to be zero. Well-tested code stored in version control that could easily be changed and developed. That usually means that they end up being pretty slow and they tend to be somewhat flaky. Its just native MySQL master-slave replication; easy to set up and maintain on dedicated hardware or in the cloud. Some examples: html_safe: [1] pry(main)> include ActionView::Helpers::OutputSafetyHelper => Object [2] pry(main)> result = hi.html_safe => hi [3] pry(main)> result.class => ActiveSupport::SafeBuffer raw: [1] pry(main)> result = raw(hi) => hi [2] pry(main)> result.class => ActiveSupport::SafeBuffer safe_concat: [1] pry(main)> include ActionView::Helpers::TextHelper => Object [2] pry(main)> buffer1 = hi.html_safe => hi [3] pry(main)> result = buffer1.safe_concat(bye) => hibye [4] pry(main)> result.class => ActiveSupport::SafeBuffer safe_join: [1] pry(main)> include ActionView::Helpers::OutputSafetyHelper => Object [2] pry(main)> result = safe_join([hi, bye]) =>
hi
bye
[3] pry(main)> result.class => ActiveSupport::SafeBuffer => ActiveSupport::SafeBuffer Rubocop: weresafe! There were task forces cobbled together to drive up reliability of the test suite, to stamp out flakes, to rewrite, and to refactor. They get the best of both worlds while we look to what comes next Finally, transition is prioritized in-stream with the needs of the organization and we never bite off more than we can chew. Hence, WebValve. Recruiter was great in connecting me with more engineers and managers to get more insight onto the role and culture. 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. I interviewed at Betterment. 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. To clarify the hierarchy of how we thought about CI, here are the high level terms and components of ourCoach CLIsystem: There are projects. Additionally, in CircleCI where we can easily parallelize our test suites, we realized we wouldnt want to notify someone for every chunk of the test suite that failed, just the first time a failure happened for the suite. According to Healthline, because legal name changes are expensive, inaccessible, and not completely effective at eliminating deadnaming, institutions like Betterment can and should make changes to support our trans customers. For example, were representing the expected value of holding VTI in your Taxable as which weve defined to be 0.07. Keeping our overhead low, while delivering top-of-the-line portfolio analysis and optimization is a key way we keep investment fees as low as possible. 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. I didn't connect too well with one of the managers in the final round and saw the rejection coming. He gave several KTs necessary for the tasks to be done. SLOs should align with business objectives and needs, which will help Product and Engineering Managers understand the direct business impact of engineering efforts. In Flutter, the way to write end-to-end tests is with flutter_driver and the integration_test package. When I started working at Betterment, I barely knew anything about finance. HR screen followed by a technical phone screen and final round. This blog post discusses the different responsibilities of these types of specs, and other related high level guidelines for specs. . CSS (the appearance): In this example, we use it to set things like the color, alignment and the border. We realized that the dependency graph of repository projects project jobs was complicated enough that we would need to recreate the entire.circleci/config.ymlfile whenever we needed to update it, instead of just modifying the YAML file in place. But we saw that the right building blocks existed to do what we wanted and proceeded with the confidence that it was theoretically possible. To migrate to Airflow, were deprecating our Luigi solution on two fronts: cross-database replication and task orchestration. 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. One system spec that asserts the happy path will be sufficient for most features. During testing, we often ran into scenarios where our model had no feasible solutionusually due to a bug we had introduced. They are very specific, testing a small portion of the system (the model under test), and cover a wide range of corner cases in that area. How is their IT department for roles like Director or VP? By hosting meetups for Women Who Code, a non-profit organization that empowers women through technology, were working to engage this community directly. Julia has excellent support for technical computing and mathematical modelling. Our process was heavily test-driven, during which product engineering reimplemented many of the R tests in JavaScript, understood the R codes intent, and ported the code while modifying for client-side performance wins. Timeline Another change is that the entire onsite interview is completed in a single day. It also made visibility easier in terms of sharing and communicating different teams SLO definitions across the org. If we used a research-first approach to build RetireGuide, the result could have been a planning tool that was mathematically sound but hard for our customers to use. Sharing code in a common environment also enables the reuse of modular analysis components. 1 Betterment Senior Software Engineer interview questions and 1 interview reviews. This is because code in the body of the main function and the bodies of groups only runs once and it does so immediately. While there are plenty of metaphors and ways to define legacy code, it has this common feature: Its always tricky to work with it. You can also watch myRails at Scale talkto learn why we developed them and how we maintain them. Common stages of the interview process at Betterment according to 99 Glassdoor interviews include: Find a Great First Job to Jumpstart Your Career, Stand Out From the Crowd With the Perfect Cover Letter, How to Prepare for Your Interview and Land the Job. We leverage tools like Rubocop and Brakeman, a static analysis tool specifically focused on security, to make our software safe by default against many of the most common security errors, even for code we havent written yet. . Weve also covered how our custom cops can help developers avoid antipatterns, resulting in safer and easier to read code. The product and engineering leadership I spoke to all came off as humble and knowledgeable, and were open about existing pain points and challenges. Its a term weve co-opted from ssl certificate lingo, and its meant to imply a chain of ownership from the authenticated user to a target resource. When loading the dynamic library (whether through Ruby-FFI or some other invocation of `dlopen`), make sure to pass the flags `RTLD_LAZY` and `RTLD_GLOBAL` (`ffi_lib_flags :lazy, :global` in Ruby-FFI). When a PR is merged, our team takes care of redistributing the new version of the library so engineers can update their configuration. A few days into my internship, I sat through a meeting about traditional and Roth IRAs wondering, what does IRA stand for? 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. We arent getting rid of all the JavaScript in our application. That meant no guaranteed connection to a cloud service mesh. This approach puts candidates at ease, and feels closer to typical pair programming than one might expect. Being able to run our financial models within our customers Web browsers ensures an instant user experience and eliminates any server lag or CPU-concerns. If you don't know Ruby + rails, don't bother since it's the only language you're allowed to work with. High quality code. 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. 1 Betterment Junior Software Engineer interview questions and 1 interview reviews. Weve baked several improvements into the delayed gem, including a highly optimized, SKIP LOCKED-based pickup query, multithreaded workers, and a novel max percent of max age metric that we use to automatically scale our worker pool up to ~3x its baseline size when queues need additional concurrency. 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. Reports available to the entire office were next. 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). We then pivoted to investigating Flutters newer replacement for flutter_driver: integation_test. We no longer write controller specs. For our Ruby on Rails apps, that looks like this: sopsorific run 'bundle exec rails c' What did we learn?