First things firstdefining our view of the problem space. Sample questions, not scripts, are provided, and interviewers are encouraged to tailor the competency questions to the candidates based on their backgrounds. Were continually evaluating whether to adopt this process for other roles, as well. You can also watch myRails at Scale talkto learn why we developed them and how we maintain them. Timeline Another change is that the entire onsite interview is completed in a single day. More generally, Lets let be the expected value of holding fund F in account A. Circling back to the original problem, we want to rearrange the holdings in Joes accounts in a way thats maximally valuable in the future. We are built from the ground up on a foundation of data. You should follow GitLab's example and make Ruby a requirement if you're going to continue your practice of having an onsite where Ruby is the only allowed language. Updating the most visible spots in our application. Not only does this increase test readability (each set up method will set up only the dependencies needed for the tests below it and within the same scope in the testing tree), but this reduces the scope for potential problems. Yan Li - Senior Software Engineer - UI - Adobe | LinkedIn 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. This allows the view to be reusable. 1. Option 1 is a very common pattern, and actually quite similar to what had been the status quo at Betterment, as most of the projections and recommendation code existed in a JavaScript service. I aced all my other onsite interviews and I currently have two offers from FAANG companies and a handful of offers from some other startups. Following the principle of least privilege, our engineering team leads are app owners of the specific applications they maintain. After considering what we were currently sending our engineers, we realized that 1)contextand 2)statuswere the most important things to communicate, which were the aspects of our old messaging that were suffering the most. The remainder falls on the shoulders of the developer and their peers to be cognizant of the choices they are making when shipping new application controllers. Its all about the customer This is where the philosophy of defining and keeping track of SLOs comes into play. Their goal is to test you on your collaboration skills (as well as technical skill). Ship It Our first run of this new process took place in November 2015. And therein lies the rub, because whether or not our job queue is colocated with our application data will greatly inform the way that we write any job-adjacent code. We used both historic and simulated data because they complement each other in making future-looking decisions: The historical data allows us to include important aspects of return movements, like auto-correlation, volatility clustering, correlation regimes, skew, and fat tails. Cassidy Williams, Venmo engineer, said impostor syndrome tends to be more common in high-achieving women. One area we need to be conscious of is how we render HTML. We're headquartered in NYC, and offer . For me, simple questions bring to mind this interesting concept called The Illusion Of Explanatory Depth, which is when people feel they understand complex phenomena with far greater precision, coherence, and depth than they really do. Simple questions tend to shed light on subjects shrouded in this illusion and force you to confront your lack of knowledge. Betterment Senior Software Engineer Interview Questions This is where SLOs come in. Over-testing takes more development time, can add additional work when refactoring or adding new features, slows down the overall test suite, and sets the wrong example for others when referencing existing tests. Rebranding a feature involved adding new styles to the application_rebrand.css and implementing them in new rebrand view files. Step 1: Recruiter call and ByteBoard OA. Tell us a bit about your life before Betterment. We leveraged ActionPack variants built into Rails and feature flags from TestTrack in new ways, ensuring we didnt need to make any architecture changes. This was one reason for automating the process, but the downsides of human-managed software were another. The process took 2 months. I came away from the in-person meetings with a strong sense that this would be both a great learning opportunity and an excellent group of people to work with. Whats kept you here? Take home test was easy and you were allowed to do it in a language of your choosing. Fewer alerts means the alerts should be something to take note of, and possibly take action on. Be the first to find this interview helpful. 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. The Evolution of the Betterment Engineering Interview Lets say that his Roth IRA holds $2,750 of VTI, and $2,750 of VWOB. Maintained and open-sourced by Mozilla, sops is a command line utility written in Go that facilitates slick encryption and decryption workflows by using your terminals default editor. We already do something like this for some jobs with our journaled gem, which uses AWS Kinesis to funnel event payloads out to our data warehouse (while at the same time benefiting from the same at-least-once delivery guarantees as our other jobs!). Find out what is missing from the rails app. 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. Some of the topics that came up were - implementing a http endpoint, writing code to make a rspec pass, active record operations. By the end of the summer, I was working on a tool to check for money launderers and fraudsters. This approach puts candidates at ease, and feels closer to typical pair programming than one might expect. Engineering the Trading Platform: Inside Betterments Portfolio Optimization To complete the portfolio optimization, Betterment engineers needed enhance the code in our existing trading platform. 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. For example, the<%==interpolation token renders content as is andraw,htmlsafe, andsafe_concatsimply return aSafeBuffercontaining the original content as is, which poses a security risk. I applied online. Following the above tips should put you well on your way to fixing existing problems in your test suite or otherwise preventing them all together! Now, updating CI requires opening a PR to make the change. If Betterment has a relationship or affiliation with the author or content, it will note this in additional disclosure. We also split the main programming portion of our original interview into separate sections with different interviewers. 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. Once all of these metrics make it to DataDog, were able to display a comprehensive timeboard that graphs things like average job runtime, throughput, time spent waiting in the queue, error rates, pickup query performance, and even some top 10 lists of slowest and most erroring jobs. It must be precise and clear where you got your data, and I dont mean conversationally clear. (Dont Repeat Yourself) and to implement UX design changes effectively and uniformly.. A little over a year ago, we rebranded our entire site. 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? And, boy howdy, are there plenty of available frameworks for doing this kind of thing! I interviewed at Betterment in Feb 2021, 3 weeks total, (4 if you make it to final onsite, each interview occured on a separate week) Alternatively, stick to only interviewing candidates who know Ruby. 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. Being surrounded by a bunch of smart, helpful people has also been super amazing and helped me grow as an engineer. Cost-Effective Scalability Since our processing needs fluctuate throughout the day, we were paying for computing power we didnt actually need during non-peak times on a single machine, as shown in our Luigi servers load. The best way to avoid legacy code is to make a best effort at not writing in the first place. 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. 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. 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). The interview was centered around how well you communicate,work with others, and problem solve. This would be accomplished through the use of dashboards displayed on TV screens inside the office. For this reason, we have a robust testing infrastructure and only peer-reviewed, thoroughly-tested code gets pushed through to production. Parting Thoughts on Our Principles Our principles arent permanent as-written. That means that our goal when writing tests should be to figure out how to achieve our target level of confidence that our features work as intended as affordably as possible. These were some of the questions we asked ourselves during this part of the design phase. Proper reliability is the greatest operational requirement for any service2. After months of planning across all teams at the company, it was time for our engineering team to implement new and responsive designs across all user experiences. Another change is that the entire onsite interview is completed in a single day. Now assume that the $50,000 in each account is invested into a portfolio of 70% stocks and 30% bonds. Building out the user interface. Here's how they did it. While we tried to construct computer science and data modelling problems that led to informative interviews, watching candidates solve these problems still wasnt getting to the heart of whether theyd be successful engineers once at Betterment. Write unit tests for a piece of the method, then refactor that piece. Had one interview for a temp customer representative position. Building for Better: Gender Inclusion at Betterment Betterment sits at the intersection of two industries with large, historical gender gaps. Prior to Betterment, I only had experience with super small codebases that I built myself or with friends. are kept secure at every stage of the software development lifecycle. Instead of using a client side MVC framework to help enable us to write a single page app, we opted to use our Rails server to render views, and we used server generated JavaScript responses to make the app feel just as snappy for our customers. First round with Hiring Manager and rejected. Either the code is poorly designed, the code has no tests around it to specify its behavior, or both. If you have influence in the hiring process, try to push for candidates who understand and respect these principles of data science. A Primer on Tax Coordination Betterments TCP feature is our very own, fully automated version of an investment strategy known as asset location. Once the tests are passing, write more tests for the next piece, and repeat the test, refactor, test, refactor process. The input data was serialized and automatically fed back into our test fixtures. We wanted to build our platform around what our engineers would need to know, when they need to know it, and how often. Copyright 2008-2023, Glassdoor, Inc. "Glassdoor" and logo are registered trademarks of Glassdoor, Inc. The first round of "in person" interviews. On the other hand, only thinking of user experience might have led to a beautiful design without quantitative substance. So, we decided that we really only want to write these flutter_driver end-to-end tests for a tiny subset of our features, almost like a "smoke testing" suite that would signal us if something was seriously wrong with our app. How likely is it that youll spot a copy-paste error at row 403,658? All of these steps, apart from the editing, are transparent to the engineer editing the secret. (Were also assuming he only wants to make at most one visit to each store.) 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. Questions were in JavaScript, ruby on rails, and React having to implement specific features into a pre developed app. Were building the future of investing. All of the things that we were testing in controller specs can instead be tested by some combination of system specs, model specs, and request specs. We stay in regular contact with stakeholders throughout a build-out and iterate over MVPs. A 2 part Byteboard interview, a technical reasoning exercise and code implementation exercise in JavaScript. This post was written with Dan Egan. First to make sure the Soup Nazi gets the ratio of ingredients he needs: .40*totalpounds=a1+b1+c1+d1 .12*totalpounds=a2+b2+c2+d2 .08*totalpounds=a3+b3+c3+d3 .15*totalpounds=a4+b4+c4+d4 .15*totalpounds=a5+b5+c5+d5 .05*totalpounds=a6+b6+c6+d6 .05*totalpounds=a7+b7+c7+d7 Then to make sure that the Soup Nazi doesnt buy more pounds of food from one store than he can carry back: a1+a2++a7<=12 b1+b2++b7<=8 c1+c2++c7<=15 d1+d2++d7<=17 We then have to put bounds on all of our variables to say that we cant take more pounds of any ingredient than any store has in stock. Learn more about engineering jobs and our culture. Abletocarry8.0pounds. So weve established that we dont want to hit external services in tests, which we can do through WebMock or similar libraries. In the end, we landed on our own flavor of a pair programming interview. A few days into my internship, I sat through a meeting about traditional and Roth IRAs wondering, what does IRA stand for? We reach our SLO goal if, during a 30 day period, 99.9% of all requests completed with one of those status codes and within that range of latency. Cassidy: For a while at work, I was very nervous that I was the least knowledgeable person in the room, and that I was going to get fired because of it. Code defines how your application behaves. Before diving head first into the code, we made it a priority to be cognizant of the engineering challenges we would face. We escape content primarily to avoid opening ourselves up to XSS (cross-site scripting) attacks. Betterments framework for locally developing and testing service-oriented apps in isolation with WebMock and Sinatra-based fakes. When the app starts up, the decrypted secrets will be available as environment variables only to the process running the application instead of being available system wide. As mentioned earlier, Julia is a just-in-time compiled language, but its possible to compile Julia code ahead-of-time usingPackageCompiler.jl. This was about 3 hours, 2 - 1 hour paired programming exercises with members of the team, and a 30 minute conversation/soft skills interview with the hiring manager. iOS also had some tests that were flaky, causing CI builds to fail unexpectedly. Everyone was very open about what they thought about the company and about what their experience at the company was like. We then moved into a coding problem that involved writing classes to model data and logic to query that data to answer increasingly complex questions. Step 2: 2-3 hour pair programming technical round in an IDE. Other Improvements We also streamlined our question-asking process and hiring timeline, and added an opportunity for candidates to speak with non-interviewers. How did we doit? Variable server response times do not provide an optimal user experience, especially when performing personalized financial projections. It was clear this part of the interviewing process needed to go. Any of these might be the topic for a future post, and might someday make their way upstream into a public release! 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 part will come off as if I'm full of myself, but my tech skills are fine. The first member of this triad is betterment_live. Engineering at Betterment: Do You Have to Be a Financial Expert? Heres how we did it. It is your responsibility to evaluate the accuracy, reliability, timeliness and completeness of any information available on a linked website. We also split the main programming portion of our original interview into separate sections with different interviewers. 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. Be the first to find this interview helpful, If you had $10k how would you sell yourself for the role. 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. Say that we want to start by testing the profile edit flow. When I sat down with them to solicit feedback on our entire hiring process, they pointed to the whiteboard problem-solving dynamics (one to two engineers sitting, observing, and judging the candidate standing at a whiteboard) as unnatural and awkward. Julia has excellent support for technical computing and mathematical modelling. No matter where they fall on that spectrum, each of these solutions has tradeoffs in its approach. 4. 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. What do you think are the biggest trends of our time in this space? 2. Maintaining a Data Dictionary wiki became a part of our Definition of Done. Another disappointment we had with the old messaging was that it didnt make us feel very good when our tests passed. With Pact, you create a contract file based on the consumer's expectations of an API and you share it with the provider. 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. Cassidy Williams, a software engineer at mobile payments company Venmo, recently came in to speak. Now, the frontend just needs to blindly listen to the server, and render the HTML as instructed. There, we have built in automated testing that resolves the version of the package that is being tested, looks up any reverse dependencies of that package, resolves the compatibility bounds of those packages to see if the newly registered version could lead to a breaking change, and if so, runs the full test suites of the reverse dependencies. Defining the Interface In order to generate the.circleci/config.ymlthat details which jobs to run and what code to execute we first needed to determine what our acceptance criteria was. Free interview details posted anonymously by Betterment interview candidates. The CLI reads a small project-level configuration definition file (coach.yml) located in a projects directory and extrapolates information to create the much larger repo-level CircleCI specific configuration file (.circleci/config.yml), which we were previously editing ourselves. About Betterment. Therefore, the cop should hold the same opinions aboutsafe_concatas it does about the other two methods. 3) 6 hour onsite. We were able to do this by having our app widget that handles dependency setup take a child, then pumping the app widget wrapped around whatever feature widget we wanted to test. How often did we want to be notified by the notification system when our tests that tested the code that built the notification system, succeeded? Search. As we've grown, we've had to push at the limits of what a database-backed queue can accomplish. But we do believe strongly that theres more to agree about than our industry has been able to establish so far. If you are new to one or both of these environments, it can be daunting to sort through all of the tools and figure out what does what. Even with this plan, migrating a highly complex web application isnt easy. chicken:6.000lbs(6.0instock) carrots:0.667lbs(8.0instock) thyme:0.183lbs(19.0instock) onions:0.733lbs(12.0instock) noodles:0.000lbs(0.0instock) garlic:0.000lbs(1.0instock) parsley:0.000lbs(6.0instock) 13.956lbsoffoodfromJerry's. That meant no guaranteed connection to a cloud service mesh. After that there was a first round interviews with 2 software engineers and 1 manager totaling about 2.5 hours. Julia solves this issue by making it very simple to take a piece of research code and refactor it for production use. Betterment is a great company to work for culture wise (as I mentioned) but unfortunately the total comp is not very competitive. Betterment Interview Questions in New York City, NY There are also feasibility limits. Opens the Fishbowl by Glassdoor site in a new window, Get started with your Free Employer Profile, The Ultimate Job Interview Preparation Guide. Controllers should pass ActiveRecord models, rather than ids, into the model layer. 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. Our CI/CD process invokes this code when it needs to, and it works great. Get better unit or integration tests in place as soon as possible. Hello, I am Siddhi Bhanushali, MLH Prep Fellow'22 , Former Community Associate Intern at Scaler,also the former Lead of HackClub SIGCE, wherein several events, workshops, competitions have been carried out successfully under my tenure & guidance which impacted 250+ students. We store fake responses with a URI template, a status code, and a body. We can rewrite this test so that each test would pass if it were run first. It is a historical archive and is not intended to be updated. False Positives With any type of static analysis, theres bound to be false positives. For our customers, it should result in better expected, risk-adjusted returns for investments. In order to avoid test inter-dependency issues, we can instead run our tests in a random order (per file) by passing the --test-randomize-ordering-seed flag to flutter test. What does the future hold? So if you havent already, make sure to enable test randomization in your Flutter codebase today! NDA signed. 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. 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). When a secret is added to production, we have a check that makes sure that same secret is also added to all other ecosystems so that they continue to function properly. Supporting Face ID on the iPhone X We look at how Betterment's mobile engineering team developed Face ID for the latest phones, like iPhone X. 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. In light of that, well cover some helpful strategies for keeping authorization front of mind. We find each integer quotient and remainder by multiplying the inflow by the weight and dividing by the total weight. Upon gem installation, we fetch the Julia source and compile it as a native extension. - Final interview, stay on one project, swap groups of different interviewers. Test, repeat, test. For Betterment engineers, it meant restructuring the underlying portfolio data model for increased flexibility. A 2 part Byteboard interview, a technical reasoning exercise and code implementation exercise in JavaScript. Coachis the beginning of that platform. Dynamicism. While this will certainly work for this particular example, enforcing that the portfolio allocation is exactly on target when determining optimality turns out to be too restrictive.