If we need to change our brand colors, lets say, we can just change the CSS in Style Closet instead of scraping our codebase and making sure we catch it everywhere. 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. At a high level, these cops track user input (via params.permit et al.) Phone interview was a typical phone screening some personal questions to make sure your experience matches the role. Our team is passionate about our mission: making people's lives better. This question can help the interviewer understand how you approach a project and what your thought process is. The last straw for using whiteboards came from feedback provided by Betterments Women in Technology group. Building Diversity And Inclusion At Betterment Change starts at the heart of the matter. Junior Software Engineer interview questions play a vital role in the job search process. It was clear this part of the interviewing process needed to go. Failed after the onsite interview because apparently my tech skills weren't "up to par." Google Play and the Google Play logo are trademarks of Google, Inc. Apple, the Apple logo, and iPhone are trademarks of Apple, Inc., registered in the U.S. Betterment assumes no responsibility or liability whatsoever for the content, accuracy, reliability or opinions expressed in a third-party website, to which a published article links (a linked website). The SLO is the target percentage, 99.9%. Additionally, we can use things like ActiveRecord to make these fake responses even more realistic based on the data stored in our actual database. But first, lets back up a little and answer a few basic questions. Its exciting to see how Ive developed since I first started attending meetups, and how some of our long-time attendees have grown as engineers and as professionals. Building A Community Of Our Own In 2018, our Women of Betterment group had an idea. 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. Betterment Software Engineering Interview Questions | Glassdoor For Betterment, this means working to build a company of passionate individuals who reflect our customers and bring new and different perspectives to our work. That will reduce friction! So we tried that. Sharing code in a common environment also enables the reuse of modular analysis components. Additionally, request specs are much more realistic than controller specs since they actually exercise the full request / response lifecycle routing, middleware, etc whereas controller specs circumvent much of that process. However, to complete this integration, we needed to migrate the entire advice tool from our R codebase into the Betterment Web application ecosystem. At Betterment, we explicitly enable this cop in our Rubocop configurations so if a developer wants to mark content as safe, they will need to explicitly disable the cop. First, we configure out test suite to use WebValve with the RSpec config helper require 'webvalve/rspec'. You are viewing a web property located at Betterment.com. Heavy mocking can make tests harder to read, harder to maintain, and provide less assurance that code is working as expected. In addition, the RSpec team recommends using system specs instead of feature specs. Every time I went with him on Take Your Child to Work Day, it became more and more clear that I wanted to be an engineer, too. On day one, we created a feature flag and started shipping rebranded code to production. Check it out on GitHub. What I mean by fake plugins is really simple. Take home test was easy and you were allowed to do it in a language of your choosing. Given the changes in Rails and the limitations of controller specs, weve changed our stance. Many of them took the time to draw diagrams and timelines to accompany their explanations. After that there was a first round interviews with 2 software engineers and 1 manager totaling about 2.5 hours. 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. Answer Example: "As a junior software engineer, I believe the most . Phone call + take home test prior to onsite. Interested in engineering at Betterment? Thankfully, Rails provides an abstraction layer on top of these, in the form of the Active Job framework. However, a user transaction object contains a host of data that isnt relevant to the trades that will eventually be created, and is associated with other objects that are also not relevant. Creating a tighter feedback loop Even though our move to create an in-house data team was a natural part of our own engineering team evolution here at Betterment, its still something of a risky unknown for most companies. To make things simple, lets assume that both portfolios are only invested in two asset classes: U.S. total market stocks and emerging markets bonds. 2 Technical interviews, followed by an AMA style lunch and then behavioral interviews for the rest of the day. Each machine pulls a simulation: Thanks the the maturation of modern message queues it is more advantageous and simple to orchestrate jobs in a pull-based fashion, than the old push system, as we mentioned above. 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.
A component is a reusable code building block. Lets add them to our objective function: is the dollar amount above the target balance in asset class AC. 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. Well-tested code stored in version control that could easily be changed and developed. Then we do the same for the deposit API call. Williams has been included as one of Glamour Magazine's 35 Women Under 35 Who Are Changing the Tech Industry and listed in the Innotribe Power Women in FinTech Index. We need to be economical about what we insert into the database (and how often) to avoid slowing down the test suite too much over time. What did change, however, was how each transaction type was translated into trading activity, which is what we wanted to test exhaustively. Top Software Engineering Manager Interview Questions and - medium.com Weve also built an equivalent library in Java, which may also see a public release at some point. Effectively, this means maintaining only a baseline level of workers throughout the day and scaling up during peaks when our workload increases. We did it! 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. Betterments promise to customers rests on our ability to execute. For more information about working at Betterment, please visit our Careers page. Each interviewer knows which competencies (e.g., software craftsmanship) to evaluate. Visualization, Reporting Careful, a trap is looming. We're not just writing code. Perhaps it is time to dedicate a sprint or two to understanding whats causing degradation of service. But a scaled engineering org presents other challenges that could just as easily put the goal out of reach. While we could achieve high availability with Luigi, its now 2017 and the data engineering landscape has shifted. In other words, every job we attempt to enqueue must, eventually, reach some form of resolution. 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. I happened to be in the market, but I had a rush timeline as I already have few offers on the table and need to made a decision within a week. We like to evaluate how well a candidate explains the design decisions and progress from one interviewer to the next. In this interview, you will most typically . In this post, Ill share how we solved the problem by leaning on functional programming to allocate money precisely across proportional buckets. Test, repeat, test. This means we must continuously iterate on our recruiting process to remain competitive in attracting and hiring top talent. Its all about the customer This is where the philosophy of defining and keeping track of SLOs comes into play. Think of something like Heroku, but for engineers here at Betterment. If youve heard one thing about Julia, its probably about its blazingly fast performance. It also keeps the test file clean of WidgetTester interaction, making the tests read more like a series of human actions rather than a series of code instructions. 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. It is your responsibility to evaluate the accuracy, reliability, timeliness and completeness of any information available on a linked website. 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. Constraints One thing to note is that for the packages were using, constraints only deal with ineq and eq where ineq means greater than. We took advantage of the divmod method in Ruby to grab the integer quotient and remainder in one shot, like so: buckets.map do |bucket| (inflow * bucket).divmod(total_bucket_weight) end This gives us 12345631000/100000, 12345635000/100000, 12345620000 /100000 and 12345614000/100000. 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. Airflowqueuesallow us to designate certain tasks to run on particular hardware (e.g. Monitors in code Engineers can choose either StatsD or Micrometer to measure complicated experiences with custom metrics, and theres various approaches to turning those metrics directly into monitors within Datadog. Step 2: 2-3 hour pair programming technical round in an IDE. Tour of the office + on-site pair programming after successful take home. 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. And when my decision making got bogged down at the end he didn't try to hassle me with silly deadlines. He has greatly inspired me with his go-getter attitude and has always . Code Review Our last line of defense is code review. Any insights would be helpful. 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. If we did away with the whiteboard, then what would we use? 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. 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. Teams without versioning are constantly asking questions like, Did Jim send the latest file?, Can I be sure that my teammate selected all columns when he re-sorted?, or The bottom line numbers are different in this report; what exactly changed since the first draft? These inefficiencies in collaboration and uncertainties about the calculations can be deadly to a data team. We built a tool (Coach) to make the way that we build and test code conventional across all of our of apps, regardless of language, application owner, or business unit. 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. 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. Less JavaScript. We went with option 2. This is where SLOs come in. Building those small, tight-knit groups promotes relationships that can help the company over time. 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. Our approach We decided to build our Julia codebase inside amonorepo, with separate packages for each conceptual project we might work on, such as interest rate models, projections, social security amount calculations and so on. More critically, the one-off script solution wasnt stored in source control, therefore it wasnt tested. The resulting analytical master file was still large, but small enough to fit on a regular MacBook Pro. How is pay, wlb & work culture. We can click on any of these links and know exactly where they go based on the logoof the service. I dragged my chair ten feet across the office and began my new life as the engineering lead of Betterments nascent data teammy new mates included two talented data analysts, a data warehousing engineer and a marketing analyst, also the product owner. In Spring of 2017, Betterments Diversity & Inclusion Steering Committee partnered with our Engineering Team to bring on two developers with non-traditional backgrounds. For us, that meant having clear, readable tests that were a joy to write. This contribution was merged as well. Stats: 88% satisfied candidates post-interview; 57% avg. Most of the first call went over background/experience technical interviewers pretty much only cared about the technical question asked. To do this, I used a tool built by our own Betterment engineer, Nathan, called Uncruft, which not only gave engineers a warning whenever they tried to use the old #first_name method but also created a list of all the places in our code where we were currently using that old method. To do this, we used GSON, which lets you convert Java objects into JSON, and vice versa. 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. 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. Lets consider a hypothetical customer account example. An easy trap to fall into as an object-oriented developer is to get too caught up in the idea that everything has to be an object. What is the interview process like at Betterment? Similarly, is the dollar amount below the target balance in asset class AC. We could not only make good decisions for Elaine, Jerry, and Newman, we could make those decisions optimally. Sr. Software Engineer - Backend (Remote) - Betterment | Built In So how do we narrow this feature spec down to something like this? 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. Cassidy Williams, Venmo engineer, said impostor syndrome tends to be more common in high-achieving women. We never got the logic quite right around determining whose code was being deployedthe deploy logic was contingent on a pretty rough shell script called inside a Jenkins job. The best we had was a Slack message that was sent roughly five minutes before a deploy began, tagging a good estimation of contributors but often missing someone if their Github email address was different from their Slack email address. But were getting into pretty uncharted territory here, and, as always, your mileage may vary! Our hiring managers now report that they have a much clearer understanding of what each candidate brings to the table. Everyone was very open about what they thought about the company and about what their experience at the company was like. Once we solve this very solvable idempotency problem, then were on track for the same net result as an exactly-once approach, even if it takes a couple extra attempts to get there. alias prod-encrypt="pbpaste | ansible-vault encrypt_string --vault-password-file=~/ansible-vault/production.key" This wasnt the worst setup, but didnt scale well as we grew. Sample questions, not scripts, are provided, and interviewers are encouraged to tailor the competency questions to the candidates based on their backgrounds. 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. Ship It Our first run of this new process took place in November 2015. Candidates applying for Software Engineer had the quickest hiring process (on average 22 days), whereas Product Designer roles had the slowest hiring process (on average 39 days). Or ask the execs at JPMorgan who lost $6 billion in the London Whale trading debacle, also due in part of poor data practices in Excel. We had no idea when it failed or missed tagging some contributors. Historically, the team has written code mostly in a research environment, implementing proof-of-concept models that are later translated into production code with help from the engineering team. So what does the fake look like? I gave a talk about Betterments engineering principles at a Rails at Scale meetup earlier last year and promised to share them after our diligent legal team finished reviewing. All interviewers were very nice and easy to talk to, one of the better interview experiences while searching for an entry level role. We came up with ACES: Automated, Consistent, Efficient, and Self-serviced as the motifs by which we could create a measurable feedback loop. And then were back to square one. We use Marionette.js, a framework built on top of Backbone.js, to help us organize our JavaScript and manage page state. This is a rails specific interview, where you get a rails app and you go through it fixing and creating features. This is extremely convenient, to say the least, since most jobs are enqueued as part of operations that persist other changes to our database, and we can in turn rely on the all-or-nothing nature of transactions to ensure that neither the job nor the data mutation is persisted without the other. The rebranded version of our applications core layout imported the new CSS file and just like that, we were in business. 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. Some javascript questions about scoping and how to build an app. One might say that this is the primary goal of any webappto provide a set of HTTP endpoints that reliably handle all the success and failure cases within a specified amount of time, and that dont topple over under high-traffic conditions. Really good! In the future, expect to read more from our team about how we use our data insights to drive product and growth development at Betterment. Our SLAs are actually defined on a per-priority basis, and weve added a feature to the delayed gem called named priorities that allows us to define priority-specific configs. The interviewer will ask you to solve a problem on a whiteboard which will assess your knowledge of data structures, sorting algorithms, recursion, time/space complexity analysis as well as pattern and edge-case recognition. Below is an example of one of our components, the flash. 40.00% 4.800lbsofcarrots. Until now, we executed transactions based on fixed weights or a precise allocation of assets to every level of risk. Engineering the Trading Platform: Inside Betterments Portfolio Optimization To complete the portfolio optimization, Betterment engineers needed enhance the code in our existing trading platform. Requirements for Modern Data Analysis Spreadsheets fundamentally lack these properties essential to modern data work. Some javascript questions about scoping and how to build an app. Were building the future of investing. Given these reasons, Julia is the perfect language to serve as a solution to the two-language problem. I get it, maybe you only want to hire people who know Ruby and that's fine, however you shouldn't waste other people's time. start on starting web-app stop on stopping web-app respawn exec su -s /bin/bash -l -c '\ cd /var/www/web-app; \ exec "$0" "$@"' web-app-owner -- sopsorific run 'bundle exec puma -C config/puma.rb' >> /var/log/upstart.log 2>&1 >Operations The 12-factor app methodology reminds us that sometimes developers need to be able to run one-off admin tasks by starting up a console on a live running server. You will work with an interviewer for a pair programming experience. We left this outside of application code so that teams can modify SLO target goals and details without having to redeploy the application itself. Prior to Betterment, I only had experience with super small codebases that I built myself or with friends. Those principles can form chains of reasoning that allow us to run fearlessly, in parallel, and arrive at coherent solutions better than the sum of their parts. Microsoft question - Design an old style mobile phone and search for various names based on key press. One year later, weve asked them to reflect on their experiences. As such, our technical interviews switched from whiteboards to computers. Heres a simplified version of our upstart configuration. Three years ago, in 2014, we implemented Touch ID support as an alternative to using PIN entry in our iOS app. Getting in the habit of asking these questions during code review should lead to more frequent conversations about security and data access. 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. I get it, maybe you only want to hire people who know Ruby and that's fine, however you shouldn't waste other people's time. However, reimplementing our financial models in a very different language exposed a number of engineering concerns. The entire process was a month long. Abletocarry12.0pounds. From a list of strings, print them out in groups that are anagrams of each other. Additionally, weve included a continuous monitoring process that runs aggregate queries, tagged and grouped by queue and priority, and that emits similar notifications that become gauge metrics. Engineering Jobs at Betterment Building the future of finance The engineering spirit, the drive to craft and build the quality service for our customers that we dream and crave for ourselves, is how Betterment began, and it's how we'll shape the future. Now that the summer has ended, I have accomplished my goal I created five dashboards displaying charts, numbers and maps with valuable data that everyone can see. I got a very upbeat and cheery sounding email to schedule the call, and my heart was pounding as I waited, and then I was met with a rejection. In building a platform as a service (PaaS), we realized that in order to mitigate the problem ofnurturing pets vs herding cattlewe would need to identify a firm set of acceptance criteria for different runtimes. 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. Our CLI and the accompanying conventions make that possible. The last important step is to make sure to convert the Charlatan instance into an adapter and pass that into our HTTP client so that the client will use it to fulfill requests. Educate everyone, not just women and minorities: When everyone is aware and discussing inclusion in the workplace, it builds and maintains a great company culture. You may be thinking, isnt this a simple math problem? As a corollary to Rule #1, we should ensure that all authorization happens in the controller by disallowing model initialization with *_id attributes. In order to do this, we built out a fake http client that allows us to configure network responses for given requests. 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. Accessing the database requires knowledge of SQL, a lot of scripts are written in Python, front end structure and design is written in HTML and CSS, and front end animation is written in javascript. Our data workers retain their ability to run existing processes until we can transition them to a better way while the engineering team has successfully expelled business users out of an already busy production environment. He calls around to all the stores just to see what the have in stock and puts together each stores inventory: Ingredients in stock (lbs) Elaines Georges Jerrys Newmans Chicken 5 6 2 3 Carrots 1 8 5 2 Thyme 3 19 16 6 Onions 6 12 10 4 Noodles 5 0 3 9 Garlic 2 1 1 0 Parsley 3 6 2 1 Also, the quality of the bags at all of the stores vary, limiting the total number pounds of food the Soup Nazi can carry back. It is your responsibility to evaluate the accuracy, reliability, timeliness and completeness of any information available on a linked website. Lets start out by exploring that robot testing technique I mentioned earlier. If its a reasonable addition to CI, our thought is that everyone should benefit. Complete a pair programming exercise consisting of some starter code and finishing out a key function. The trick here is that JavaScript is a simple call to jQuerys htmlmethod, and we use Rails built-in partial view rendering to respond with all the HTMLwe need. We run millions of these so-called background jobs daily using a SQL-backed queuenot Redis, or RabbitMQ, or Kafka, or, um, you get the pointand weve very intentionally made this choice, for reasons that will soon be explained! Keep in mind, descriptive group names go a long way in adding clarity to what dependencies that bucket relies upon. Another option is to start tracking the level of operational complexity for their systems. This leads to less test setup and fewer tests per model to establish confidence that the code is behaving as expected. Our custom solution to integration testing After trying flutters solutions fruitlessly, we decided to build out a solution of our own. Thirdly, we don't want to have shared code across service boundaries. Moving your organization towards these ideals is likely to be an imperfect and gradual process. Back in the Day Heres how our interview process once looked: Resum review Initial phone screen Technical phone screen Onsite: Day 1 Technical interview (computer science fundamentals) Technical interview (modelling and app design) Hiring manager interview Onsite: Day 2 Product and design interview Company founder interview Company executive interview While this process helped in growing our engineering team, it began showing some cracks along the way. (To any Java devs reading this: let us know if that interests you!) 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.