2.5 hr final onsite - behavioral (I did not make it here, but recruiter told me schedule beforehand), Anonymous Interview Candidate in New York, NY, I applied online. But first, lets back up a little and answer a few basic questions. The CLI handles notifications, artifact generation, and deployment triggers. I was able to build my dashboards as a Web app, so I not only needed to understand this structure, but I needed to implement it as well. Model Specs Model specs test business logic. At Betterment, our end goal is to always combine both. Algorithm Interviews. Youll thank yourself when you need to update the input data, and your successors and colleagues will be thankful they know what youre basing your conclusions on. In person pair programming was in Ruby only. Our CI/CD process invokes this code when it needs to, and it works great. Betterment interview details: 2 interview questions and 2 interview reviews posted anonymously by Betterment interview candidates. To get there we had to make all of our Java apps respond to the same set of commands, and all of our Ruby apps to do the same. 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. Any changes are then reviewed in a pull request along with the rest of the code. We use these cops in conjunction with the default RuboCop configurations for all of our Ruby projects. 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. As a result, only 26% of 20-somethings have any money invested in stocks. To do this, we can relate the terms with the terms using linear constraints. I went above and beyond for years doing extra work, organizations etc and nothing has been reflected in pay. 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 can introduce sneaky testing bugs that may not surface until the tests themselves run in random order. Since our founding, weve maintained a commitment to consistently build a better company and product for our customers and our customers-to-be. The last part of defining our SLOs is including a date when we plan to revisit that SLO specification. At no point did I feel the pressure thats normally associated with landing a job. One tech phone screen, 5 hrs on site with other team leads, hiring manager, CTO, and a follow-up 2hrs onsite tech interview, offer was made. Lets say weve defined some SLOs and notice they are falling behind over time. Effectively, this means maintaining only a baseline level of workers throughout the day and scaling up during peaks when our workload increases. 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. No algorithmic brain teasers. We use a multi-threaded web server for our production application, and so when we make a call into the Julia shared library, we push that call onto a queue where it gets picked up and performed by a single executor thread which then communicates the result back to the calling thread using apromiseobject. You want to help others whenever you can; and it has been the case that Ive received plenty of help from others who arent even directly on my team. Photo credit: Christine Meintjes Abi: Can you speak about a time in your life where impostor syndrome was limiting in your own career? This article is part ofEngineering at Betterment. This works well from a development perspective, but we soon faced the question of how best to integrate this code with our production code, which is mostly developed in Ruby. In addition to Coach explicitly providing a config-driven interface for monitors, weve also written a couple handy runtime specific methods that result in automatic instrumentation for Rails or Java endpoints. So does the delayed approach scale? Then, a group of engineers from each squad began tackling each deprecation one by one. With Pact, you create a contract file based on the consumer's expectations of an API and you share it with the provider. Bootstrapping is a process by which you take random chunks of historical data and re-order it. 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. Request specs for APIs are owned by the consuming apps team to ensure that the invariants that they expect to hold are not broken. By default, sopsorific wants to be configured with a production (sensitive zone) secrets file and a default (non-sensitive zone) secrets file. Developers can also run these validations locally: sopsorific check Deployment The application server is configured with the instance profile generated by sopsorific so that it can assume the IAM role that it needs to decrypt the secrets at runtime. The solutions that come out of that awareness are game-changing. If you have been using the randomization flag since the inception of your codebase, youre in a fantastic position and can be confident in your tests! In order to do this, we built out a fake http client that allows us to configure network responses for given requests. This Ruby app needs to run integration tests! Test, repeat, test. 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. Is the authenticated user authorized to operate on the resource in accordance with Rule #1? The contract defines the expectations of input and output for the exchange. But what happens when our workers are busy with other work during a deploy? In Rails 5+, integration tests have been made to run very fast. This means that these usages ofrawandhtml_safeshould still be violations. the application or models in question dont have a concept of private data The flagged code isnt actually insecure: e.g. Betterment recruiter reached out to me about a Trading team opening. The last straw for using whiteboards came from feedback provided by Betterments Women in Technology group. 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. Different approaches are possible. 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. We had the pleasure of contributing a few changes to sops, and that left us feeling like we left the community a little bit better than we found it. Ill just use Betterment. In Spring of 2017, Betterments Diversity & Inclusion Steering Committee partnered with our Engineering Team to bring on two developers with non-traditional backgrounds. The CircleCI info includes the title of the job that failed (coach_clilint (Gemfile)), the build number (#11389) to reference for context in case there are multiple occurrences of the failure in multiple workflows, a link to the top-level Workflow, and@s for each contributor. . Extending AirflowCode Airflow tasks that pass data to each other can run on different machines, presenting a new challenge versus running everything on a single machine. And this is precisely why, at Betterment, we start each application off with a database-backed queue, co-located with the rest of the apps data, with the guarantee of at-least-once job execution. All of these steps, apart from the editing, are transparent to the engineer editing the secret. Right away we know whats happened. 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. Enter, end-to-end-ish tests (patent pending ). Using our new platform to build and test code would allow our engineers to receive automated feedback sooner so they could iterate faster. It was just a moment in time that came and went: In the New World we wanted to proclaim loudly (or as loudly as you can proclaim in a Slack message) that the pull request was successful in CI: Tada! 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. Each interviewer knows which competencies (e.g., software craftsmanship) to evaluate. 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. A lot of the time, the plugin code is also integration tested as well because the benefits outweigh the costs for many plugins, e.g. It should just work unless there are secrets that have different values than already configured in the default file. Actual salaries may vary depending on factors including but not limited to location, experience, and performance. One challenge we have that most existing iOS apps share is the need to still support older iOS versions. It also really felt like the company was working in good faith the entire process and I definitely took notice. Isolate the right information With this abstraction, we were able to isolate the absolute core objects that we need to perform trades, and ignore the rest. tags: - team:sre thresholds: - target: 99.5 timeframe: 30d warning_target: 99.99 monitor_ids: - 30842606 The interface supports metrics directly as well (mirroring Datadogs SLO types) so an engineer can reference any metric directly in their SLO definition, as seen here: # availability - last_updated_date: "2021-02-16" approval_date: "2021-03-02" next_revisit_date: "2021-03-15" category: availability tags: - team:sre thresholds: - target: 99.9 timeframe: 30d warning_target: 99.99 type: metric description: 99.9% of manual deploys will complete successfully over a 30day period. 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. In order to ensure changes to our test harness didnt have far reaching effects on the underlying framework, we decided to split out the testing framework into an independent package that is completely agnostic to how our app operates. We used to use controller specs instead of request specs. As good companies tend to do, it began growingnot just in terms of users, but in terms of capabilities. I applied through a recruiter. Testing & Code Review Strategies Rubocop and Rails tooling can only get us so far in mitigating authorization bugs. Engineering the Launch of a New Brand for Betterment In 2017, Betterment set out tolaunch a new brandto better define the voice and feel of our product. A web request was made, code was executed, and by enqueuing a job, we said we'd eventually do something. Ive inquired about pay but its gotten nowhere. Jesse Harrelson: The direct mentorship during my apprenticeship and exposure to a large production codebase. Everyone's going mobile! The benefit we found in flutter_driver was that we could run it in our production-like environment against preset test users. 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. First was with 2 members on the team, last was with a manager. So, suffice it to say, at-least-once semantics are crucial in more ways than one, and not all ActiveJob backends provide them. While we want to iterate rapidly, we strive to never compromise the security of our customers nor the correctness of our code. There was no hint of arrogance or a lack of candor from anyone. However, if your tests arent run in random order, you may have a false sense of confidence that the assertions youre making in them are actually accurate. Fidel Severino: Im originally from the Dominican Republic and moved to the United States at age 15. Interviewers were professional throughout. In the case of services not performing well over time, the conversation might be focus on improving reliability for service XYZ. But what happens if our users are super happy, our SLOs are exceptionally well-defined and well-achieved, and were ahead of our roadmap? About Betterment. Points for trying though, right? Technical interview (computer science fundamentals), Technical interview (modelling and app design), Ask the candidate to describe a recent technical challenge in detail, Introduce the pair programming problem and explore the problem, Pair programming (optional, time permitting). This gave us the flexibility to switch easily between a variety of third-party mathematical programming solvers. If the code is not on any active or planned future development paths and has been working for years, it probably isn't worth it. The first of these issues was that the cop allowed usage ofrawandhtmlsafewhen the usages were wrapped insafejoin. Weve written a few useful helpers that allow us to easily plug in our new server-driven style into our existing Marionette application. What is an SLO? It may be surprising then to learn that we actually went with Option 2. The Evolution of the Betterment Engineering Interview Betterments engineering interview now includes a pair programming experience where candidates are tested on their collaboration and technical skills. When he signed up for Betterment, he opened a Roth IRA account. Lets say it is. Jesse Harrelson: Coding became a hobby for me when I would make websites for my bands in Nashville, but after meeting up with more and more people in tech in the city, I knew it was something I wanted to do as a career. Lets say that each account holds $50,000, for a total of $150,000 in investments. At the same time, requiring a lot of mocks is generally a sign that the method under test either is doing too many different things, or the model is too highly coupled to other models in the codebase. As such, information on this page may not be up to date. Our initial task was to interview internal stakeholders to get at their data-related pain points. We arent getting rid of all the JavaScript in our application. See IRA limits here and 401(k) limits. This includes validations, instance and class method inputs and outputs, Active Record callbacks, and other model behaviors. 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. 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. Normally wed consider opting out of security analysis to be an unsafe thing to do, but we actually like the way RuboCop handles this because it can help reduce some code review effort; the first solution eliminates the vulnerable-looking pattern (even if it wasnt a vulnerability to begin with) while the second one signals to reviewers that they should confirm this code is actually safe (making it easy to pinpoint areas of focus). How is pay, wlb & work culture. Im Jesse, a recruiter here at Betterment, and I had the immense pleasure of working closely with these two. While the series focuses on programming for women and those who identify as women, it is inclusive to everyone in our community who wish to be allies and support our mission. Get started with your Free Employer Profile, The Ultimate Job Interview Preparation Guide. Weve pushed the aforementioned nuisance and complexity into our data pipeline (ETL) process and are able to synthesize atomic and summary metrics in a format that is more intuitive for our business users. 3 step process for me: We liked notifying engineers when a deploy began, but we needed to be more accurate about who we were notifying. We decided to tackle it using a tab-by-tab approach. If youre significantly exercising behavior not in the layer youre writing a test for, you might be putting the test in the wrong place. In his taxable account, Joe holds $5,500 worth of U.S. total market stocks in VTI (Vanguard Total Stock Market ETF), and $5,500 worth of emerging markets bonds in VWOB (Vanguard Emerging Markets Bond ETF). 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. Now that weve wrangled our CI process and encoded the best practices into a tool, were ready to tackle our Continuous Deployment pipeline. 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. I interviewed at Betterment in Feb 2022. We focus on writing expressive, fast, and reliable solitary unit tests, some sociable integrated tests of related units, and some "end-to-end-ish" tests. We came up with ACES: Automated, Consistent, Efficient, and Self-serviced as the motifs by which we could create a measurable feedback loop. 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. On the other hand, only thinking of user experience might have led to a beautiful design without quantitative substance. Theyd attended a number of networking and connection events, and the events never felt quite right. Weve talked before about how making sure everything is running perfectly -- especially given all the cases we need to handle -- makes us cringe at the cyclomatic complexityof some of our methods. 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. Our Women Who Code meetups become a way to track your progression. Stay tuned. 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. Cassidy Williams, a software engineer at mobile payments company Venmo, recently came in to speak. Reviewing your professional documents before the interview ensures you're well prepared for questions about skills, previous jobs or educational . Learn more about engineering jobs and our culture. I started reading Robert Shillers Finance and the Good Society, a book my dad recommended to me months earlier. Updating the most visible spots in our application. These are our decision variablesvariables that were trying to solve for. It can also dramatically reduce the amount of time it takes to solve a problem. It's a class with a route defined for each URL we care about faking. I dont hear anyone saying that expensive proprietary data solutions are the future. The structure of a Web app is a lot more complex than what the user sees on the page. 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. I made sure to keep in touch because I would be interning in the Bay Area, where shes located, and weve been chatting ever since. 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. 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. This approach puts candidates at ease, and feels closer to typical pair programming than one might expect. Or perhaps we notice that what were measuring is becoming increasingly irrelevant to a customer experience, and we can get rid of the SLO entirely! Plenty of jobs may complete in failure, or simply fail to complete, and may require some form of automated or manual intervention. At first, I thought my lack of exposure to finance put me at a disadvantage. Continuous Delivery (CD) at scale is hard to get right. 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. Our unit tests are not only to test behavior and drive good design, but should also be readable to the extent that they help document the code itself. As demonstrated, Rails provides some methods that mark content as safe without escaping it for us. 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.

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