We wanted to build a thoughtfully composed platform based on the tried and true principles of12-factor apps. At the time, we also couldnt find a way to federate permissions with Ansible Vault in a way that didnt hinder our workflow by causing a bottleneck for developers. Any improvements you've brought to your current team? We love the idea of these tests, the level of confidence they'd give us that our app works as intended, and how they'd eliminate manual QA testing, but we loathe the cost of running them, both in terms of time and actual $$$ of CI execution. It failed for a specific GitHub branch(what-to-say-when-things-fail-branch),ina specific repo(Betterment/coach),for a specific PR(#430),for aspecific job in the test suite (coach_clilint (Gemfile)). The right hand side of the equation is assumed to be zero. 3. Through fixing the tests, we learned lessons that could help others have a less painful migration themselves. If our SLOs dont align directly with business objectives and needs, they should align indirectly via tracking operational complexity and maturity. Visualization, Reporting Careful, a trap is looming. If our service didnt succeed at that goal, the violation overflow called an error budget shows us by how much we fell short. 2 Technical interviews, followed by an AMA style lunch and then behavioral interviews for the rest of the day. But so is reliability and performance. Interview questions for java software engineer designed for both interviewers and candidates, valuable advice on how to prepare for interviews, develop effective questioning strategies, and answer tricky questions with confidence. Our goals in standardizing the CI interface were to: Make it easier to distribute new CI features more quickly across the organization. But we saw that the right building blocks existed to do what we wanted and proceeded with the confidence that it was theoretically possible. We needed a solution that not only maintained our security posture throughout the software development lifecycle, but also enforced our opinions about how secrets should be managed across environments. The Nitty Gritty Details In order to describe how our integration tests work, let's start by describing an example app that we may want to test. While we love the concern that our engineers show toward solving these problems, these deviations became problematic for applications of the same runtime that should abide by the same set of rules; for example, all Ruby apps should runRSpecandRubocop, not just some of them. We're engineering Betterment to become a top-notch fintech company. Process consisted of a phone screening with a recruiter, online tech assessment, and 2 video call interviews. This concept is oft-quoted in Julian circles and is perfectly exemplified by the previous workflow of our team: Investing Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) write domain-specific code thats solely meant to serve as research code, and that code then has to be translated into some more performant language for use in production. the shared preferences plugin can use a single integration test to provide certainty that it works as intended. multi-tenancy), team-level job ownership annotations, resumable bulk orchestration and batch enqueuing of millions of jobs at once, forward-scheduled job throttling, and also the ability to encrypt the inputs to jobs so that they arent visible in plaintext in the database. All coding exercises were real world examples, no leetcode or theoretical problem solving questions. Its delightful and easy to parse and has just the right amount of information. During testing, we often ran into scenarios where our model had no feasible solutionusually due to a bug we had introduced. We like to extract standard assertions such as ones relating to authentication into shared examples.
Algorithm Interviews. I am passionate about making a positive impact on society through the construction of safe . Soon enough, I had not only expanded my knowledge of engineering best practices, but I learned about dividends, tax loss harvesting, and IRAs (it stands for individual retirement account, in case you were wondering). The solutions that come out of that awareness are game-changing. I thought my 5 year was going to finally show something but it did not. Ultimately, using fake plugins works well and makes this a satisfyingly functional testing solution. From a list of strings, print them out in groups that are anagrams of each other. We solve problems from different angles. If we buried the authorization within the model, it would be difficult to ensure that the trust-root chain is being enforced especially if the model is used by multiple controllers that handle authorization inconsistently. For example, we can tag an element with a data-behavior-dropdown, and then we have some simple, well organized global JavaScript that knows how to wrap that element in some code that makes it more interactive. 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. In the end, we landed on our own flavor of a pair programming interview. When we set up a new plugin and we wrap it in a class that we inject into our app. Other Improvements We also streamlined our question-asking process and hiring timeline, and added an opportunity for candidates to speak with non-interviewers. I highly recommend using it. The Interview Study Guide For Software Engineers. Williams goal is to help women recognize the characteristic and empower them to overcome it. Free interview details posted anonymously by Betterment interview candidates. Here's how they did it. Further, because all three schemas live in the same MySQL server, client_analytics becomes a central hub from which our colleagues can join tables that have not yet been modeled in the warehouse with key dimensions that have been. Thats why we invest in your growth, constant learning, and a forward-looking career path. Decisions, decisions While researching our options, we happened upon a tool calledsops. Coding challenge and Sys design. Joes overall portfolio must also maintain its allocation of 50% stocks and 50% bondsthe risk profile he selected. More from Betterment: Server Javascript: A Single-Page App ToA Single-Page App Going to Work at Betterment Engineering at Betterment: Do You Have to Be a Financial Expert? Lets assume that a User has many Attachments that can be attached to a Document they own. Sample questions, not scripts, are provided, and interviewers are encouraged to tailor the competency questions to the candidates based on their backgrounds. TL;DRWebValve is an open-source gem that uses Sinatra and WebMock to provide fake HTTP service behavior. We can enforce access rules by using the affordances of our relational data without the need for any additional permission framework. Therefore, we can calculate our bounds with, defcalc_bounds(): bounds=[] forsinstores: foriiningredients: bounds.append((0,store_inventory[s][i])) returnbounds Guess Providing a good initial guess can go a long way in getting you to a desirable solution. See IRA limits here and 401(k) limits. Thats a lot of time we can reasonably not react to failures. REST is semantic, evolvable, limber, and very familiar to us as Rails developers a natural other side of the coin for HTTP to make up the lingua franca of the web. There are only two security zones per GitHub repositorysensitive, and non-sensitiveeven if there are multiple apps in a repository. 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. It's similar to libraries for other platforms that allow you to define fake responses for HTTP requests using a nice API and then inject those fake responses into your HTTP client. 1 Betterment Mobile Software Engineer interview questions and 1 interview reviews. For his recipe he needs a ratio of: 40% chicken 12% carrots 8% thyme 15% onions 15% noodles 5% garlic 5% parsley All of the stores around him only keep limited amounts in stock. This page is operated and maintained by Betterment Holdings Inc. and it is not associated with Betterment LLC or MTG LLC. Instead, we opted to model our problem as a linear program. These were some of the questions we asked ourselves during this part of the design phase. Joe isnt one to take huge risks, so he opted for a moderate asset allocation of 50% stocks and 50% bonds in both his Roth IRA and taxable accounts. They say multiple times that you can come into this job not knowing any rails, and that the interviewers will be accommodating of your background, this is a quarter true. Model specs have a live database connection, but we like to think of our model specs as unit tests. While the nascency of Julia as a language means that the community and ecosystem is much smaller than those of other languages, we found that the code and community oversamples on the type of libraries that we care about. Messages about failures are nowactionableandfull of context,prompting the engineer to participate in CI,to go directly to their failures or to their PR. The complexity partly arose from the fact that we needed to duplicate business logic from the backend and the frontend. Free interview details posted anonymously by Betterment interview candidates. By writing that YAML inside of Ruby classes we can grow and expand our pipeline as needed, trusting that our tests confirm the YAML looks how we expect it to look. For example,secreteditorsensitive_coachwhere coach is the name of the repository. We want to minimize the hops and jumps required to figure out what were granting access to, so we make sure that it all happens in the controller. Normally, this is a process that can literally take years (and may explain why legacy investing services are slow to switch to algorithmic asset allocation and advice.) 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. A 2 part Byteboard interview, a technical reasoning exercise and code implementation exercise in JavaScript. A number of factors are used to determine this, but most importantly each funds tax efficiency and expected returns. These frameworks have recently begun to move away from this LPOP-based approach, in favor of using RPOPLPUSH (to atomically move jobs to a queue that can then be monitored for orphaned jobs), but outside of Sidekiq Pro, this strategy doesnt yet seem to be broadly available. As of July 2016, all full-stack, mobile, and site-reliability engineering roles have adopted this new approach. Glassdoor has millions of jobs plus salary information, company reviews, and interview questions from people on the inside making it easy to find a job thats right for you. 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. These questions are designed to test your knowledge and understanding of prompt engineering and will also be useful for interview preparation if you are seeking a role as a prompt engineer. Free interview details posted anonymously by Betterment interview candidates. At a high level, the Coach CLI generates a lot of yaml files that are used in all sorts of places to help manage operational complexity and cloud resources for consumer-facing web-apps. Finally, convention over configurationif we can load, register, and wire-up a fake based on its name, for example, that would be handy. Weve found it to be a great solution to our own version of the two-language problemthe idea that the language in which it is most convenient to write a program is not necessarily the language in which it makes the most sense to run that program. 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. Modeling and implementing our portfolio management algorithms using linear programming was not easy, but it ultimately resulted in the simplest possible system needed to reliably pursue optimal after-tax returns. I couldnt tell you what a dividend was. When an input or an assumption changes, it should be as easy as re-running the whole thing. I applied online. This owner method for Rails apps results in all logs, error reports, and metrics being tagged with the teams name, and at deploy time it's aggregated by a Coach CLI command and turned into latency monitors with reasonable defaults for optional parameters; essentially doing the same thing as our config-driven approach but from within the code itself class DeploysController < ApplicationController owner "sre", max_response_time: "10000ms", only: [:index], slack: false end For Java apps we have a similar interface (with reasonable defaults as well) in a tidy little annotation. - last_updated_date: "2021-02-18" approval_date: "2021-03-02" next_revisit_date: "2021-03-15" category: latency type: monitor description: This SLO covers latency for our CI notifications system - whether it's the github context updates on your PRs or the slack notifications you receive. Ultimately I decided to go with the other company because the team I'll be joining is newly forming and there's an outsized opportunity to have a big impact. Ive always had a curious mind. All the new features were working on for customers with multiple accountsbe they Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs), taxable investment accounts, trusts, joint accounts, or even synced outside accountsrequired this change. Needless to say I definitely wish I could stay and work with Betterment rather than going back to school next week, but todays society is under the strange impression that a college degree is important, so I guess Ill finish it out. Therefore our objective function becomes, a1a2a3a4d6d7 And expressing that with numpy is pretty painless: numpy.sum(x)*1.0 Bounds Bounds make sure that we dont take more than any one ingredient than the store has in stock. Hopefully, it is possible to write unit tests for at least a part of the method's behavior. We needed more easily accessible business measures with sufficient context by which we and our colleagues could roll up or slice and dice our data. Currently were focusing on building more intricate and and interactive components using React. Ruthe Farmer - I first met Ruthe back in 2010 during my senior year of high school when I won the Illinois NCWIT Aspirations Award. Dont rewrite JavaScript. Proper reliability is the greatest operational requirement for any service2. On the other hand, only thinking of user experience might have led to a beautiful design without quantitative substance. We talked to other developers who might be more familiar with it. Tell me about a time you collaborated at work. We want the API provider to own and version their APIs, and we want the API consumer to own their integration with each version of a collaborator service's API. Interviews are now more prescriptive regarding non-technical questions. Weve also built an equivalent library in Java, which may also see a public release at some point. Free interview details posted anonymously by Betterment interview candidates. Copyright 2008-2023, Glassdoor, Inc. "Glassdoor" and logo are registered trademarks of Glassdoor, Inc. With our app being add-to-app and utilizing plugins, we didnt want to have to run anything native in our testing. System specs are more performance intensive than the other spec types, so in most cases we lean towards fewer system specs that do more things, going against the convention that tests should be very granular with one assertion per test. Investing the time to run Airflow as a cluster versus a single machine allows us to run work in a more elastic manner, saving costs and using optimized hardware for particular jobs. As a Goo. Those are stored in a file named .coach/datadog_monitors.yml and look like this: monitors: - type: metric metric: "coach.ci_notification_sent.completed.95percentile" name: "coach.ci_notification_sent.completed.95percentile SLO" aggregate: max owner: sre alert_time_aggr: on_average alert_period: last_5m alert_comparison: above alert_threshold: 5500 - type: apm name: "Pull Requests API endpoint violating SLO" resource_name: api::v1::pullrequestscontroller_show max_response_time: 900ms service_name: coach page: false slack: false It wasnt simple to make this abstraction intuitive between a Datadog monitor configuration and a user interface. Were using AmazonsDatabase Migration Service(DMS) to replace our Luigi-implemented replication solution and re-building all other Luigi workflows in Airflow. If you don't know Ruby + rails, don't bother since it's the only language you're allowed to work with. By automating detection of these low hanging fruit vulnerabilities, we can free up engineering effort during security reviews and focus on more interesting and complex issues. By the way, this is a topic I could talk about endlessly, so Ill leave it there for now. Sometimes, it's a good idea to think outside the box in order to strike the right balance of test coverage, confidence, and maintainability. Before my internship, finance, to me, was a field in which some of my peers would work more hours than I had hours of consciousness. To accomplish this, we need to define new decision variables. Again, it combines both DelayedJob and its ActiveRecord backend, and should be more or less compatible with Rails apps that already use ActiveJob or DelayedJob. We did this by providing well-defined interfaces that give engineers access to core system data needed to generate our model. Who are your biggest inspirations in the industry? We dont want to terminate workers while theyre finishing something up and instead want them to terminate after the work is done (not accepting new work in the interim). 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. A PR build failed. The Flutter integration testing landscape At the very beginning of our transition to flutter, we started trying to write integration tests for our features using flutters solution at the time: flutter_driver. For example, the
character is escaped using>, and the&character is escaped using&. 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. 2021 Betterment Holdings Inc. Rubocop, a popular Ruby static analysis tool, provides a cop (which is what Rubocop calls a check) to alert us when were using these methods:Rails/OutputSafety. 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. Hence, WebValve. I was one of those kids who broke their toys in order to find out how they worked. Its nice to give candidates a short break in between interviews, but the main reason for the separation is to evaluate the handoff. The most common type of interview you will encounter. Tour of the office + on-site pair programming after successful take home. Perhaps it is time to dedicate a sprint or two to understanding whats causing degradation of service. For this reason, we have a robust testing infrastructure and only peer-reviewed, thoroughly-tested code gets pushed through to production. This gave us the flexibility to switch easily between a variety of third-party mathematical programming solvers. The first of these issues was that the cop allowed usage ofrawandhtmlsafewhen the usages were wrapped insafejoin. Thirdly, we want to be able to autoload our fakes. 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. Longer answer: Here at Betterment, we use both. Fidel Severino: The opportunity to join Betterments Apprenticeship program came via the Flatiron School. All code is peer reviewed and does not go to production if there is not adequate test coverage or if the code is not up to design standards. SLOs will ensure that we have a solid understanding of the state of our services in terms of reliability, and they empower us to focus on user happiness. This test would go on to have a few more steps detailing the interactions on the subsequent screens. I have been interviewing Software Engineers for over 25 years and in my current role as CEO of Solution Street, I conduct, on average, two interviews a week. We use the uri package to support matching templated URLs rather than requiring developers to pass in exactly matching strings for requests their tests will make. 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). This is made possible, at least in part, by the ability to perform units of work asynchronously. sopsorific runis another custom command we built to make our usage of sops seamless. We came up with a few rules to design this part of the system: Let the author knowas soon as possiblewhen something is red but dont overdo it for redundant failures within the same job (e.g. Enter the SHARE (Support, Hire, Aspire, Relate, Empower) Series. Its as if we optimized the engine for a car, and now we needed to test it on the race track with different weather conditions, tires, and drivers. The second of these issues was that the cop prevented usages ofrawandhtmlsafe, but did not prevent usages ofsafeconcat. As a result, only 26% of 20-somethings have any money invested in stocks. To do good data work today, you need to use a system that is reproducible, versionable, scalable, and open. It is notoriously hard to estimate the complexity of a task when it needs to be built into or on top of a legacy system. We think that our Web app will be just as pleasant to use, and we can more quickly enhance and build new features going forward. At Betterment, our ultimate goal is to continue developing products that change the investing worldand that starts with data. This means we must continuously iterate on our recruiting process to remain competitive in attracting and hiring top talent. What we ended up with was a black box Allocator module, with a public module function to which you could pass 2 arguments: an inflow, and an array of weightings. Development & Deployment We mimic our production cluster as closely as possible for development & testing to identify any issues that may arise with multiple workers. Lets plug in some balances to see what the expected value of V is with Joes current holdings: V=0.07*5500+0.04*5500+0.06*2750+0.05*2750=907.5 Certainly, we can do better. Assuming a User has many Documents then we would change our controller to the following: Now any document_id that doesnt exist in the users object graph will raise a 404 and weve provided authorization for this endpoint without a framework - easy peezy. Engineering at Betterment: Do You Have to Be a Financial Expert? The key to the success of this project was to keep the build simple, maintain a low risk of regressions, and ensure a clear path to remove the legacy brand code after launch.
Enqueues and Transactions See, theres a major gotcha that may not be obvious from the list of ActiveJob backends. I interviewed at Betterment (New York, NY). Lets put it all together now into an actual test. We hired Jesse Harrelson (Betterment for Advisors Team) and Fidel Severino (Retail Team) for a 90 day Apprentice Program. Make a feature or two. How did you manage when you were under pressure? Ans: Civil engineering has always been an exciting field for me, as it involves designing and building infrastructure that people use on a daily basis. Betterments promise to customers rests on our ability to execute. The novelty of our approach was to essentially build partial, precise scaffolding around our current platform. Maintaining a Data Dictionary wiki became a part of our Definition of Done. This database is a complete, real-time, read-only replica of our production database. Server app for the TestTrack multi-platform split-testing and feature-gating system. But at one point (fairly recently, honestly), it just clicked that I knew what I was doing. All coding exercises were real world examples, no leetcode or theoretical problem solving questions. It is a historical archive and is not intended to be updated. This test could be added into our suite of other tests and run with each commit. I had a very pleasant experience interviewing with the team at Betterment. Modern Data Analysis: Dont Trust Your Spreadsheet To conduct research in business, you need statistical computing that you easily reproduce, scale, and make accessible to many stakeholders. We decided to tackle it using a tab-by-tab approach. In each case, once I had a clear solution in mind, we shifted to a laptop set up with IntelliJ to implement and test parts of my solution. In Flutter, the way to write end-to-end tests is with flutter_driver and the integration_test package. Each file with detailed asset allocation, tax, trading and returns information was archived inexpensively in the cloud. Everyone was very open about what they thought about the company and about what their experience at the company was like. Members break out and solve problems together, sharing and honing skills, while building community and support. Also, the flutter_driver API worked differently than the screen testing API and was generally more difficult to use. 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. 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. It's definitely a bummer that we can't exercise that real plugin code, but when you think about it, that plugin code is tested in the plugin's test suite. 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. The technical portions were not difficult and didn't need much preparation beyond what I would do normally at work. The end result: a completely fresh set of views and a new brand were excited to share with the world at large. As of July 2016, all full-stack, mobile, and site-reliability engineering roles have adopted this new approach. 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. This becomes even more dangerous if the Documents table uses sequential ids, as that would make it easy for an attacker to start combing through the entire table. For reference, consider the diagram. Today: A Better Interview Heres our revised interview process: Resum review Initial phone screen Technical phone screen Onsite: Technical interview 1 Ask the candidate to describe a recent technical challenge in detail Set up the candidates laptop Introduce the pair programming problem and explore the problem Pair programming (optional, time permitting) Technical interview 2 Pair programming Technical interview 3 Pair programming Ask-Me-Anything session Product and design interview Hiring manager interview Company executive interview While an interview setting may not offer pair programming in its purest sense, our interviewers truly participate in the process of writing software with the candidates. We could have attempted to construct a procedural-style heuristic solution to this, but the complexity of the problem led us to believe this approach would be hard to implement and challenging to maintain. Rule #2: Controllers should pass ActiveRecord models, rather than ids, into the model layer. Upon gem installation, we fetch the Julia source and compile it as a native extension. Interview with other companies simultaneously. We not only had unit tests such as the one above to test simple scenarios where a human could calculate the outcome, but we also ran the optimizer in a simulated production-like environment, through hundreds of thousands of scenarios that closely resembled real ones.
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