However, with so many sources of input affecting the optimized result, writing tests to cover these cases was very labor-intensive. Fidel Severino: Im originally from the Dominican Republic and moved to the United States at age 15. The parent object of any activity inside the Betterment platform is a user transaction that includes deposits or withdrawals for a goal, dividends, allocation changes, transfer of money between goals and so on. 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. You will need to be passingly familiar with the language they're using. The Evolution of the Betterment Engineering Interview Aug 2, 2016 12:00:00 AM Betterments engineering interview now includes a pair programming experience where candidates are tested on their collaboration and technical skills. Great office dogs. But the reality of even a fully "scaled up" queue solution is that, if it is doing anything particularly interesting, it is likely to be database-bound. In doing all of these things, weve reduced bottlenecks for developers so they can focus more on shipping features and less on managing secrets. That means the next step was to build a killer testing framework. 3 step process for me: While we may implement a hot-standby backup in the future, we simply accept it as a known risk and set our monitoring system to notify a team member of any deviances. Companies should strive for a fair balance between adding new features and refactoring legacy code, and should establish a culture where thoughtful code design is a priority. That's what we do here at Betterment, come join us! But, if Elaine was set up a certain way, we wanted to go back to Jerry and adjust the decisions we made for him. If our acceptance criteria change, because everything is written in code, adding a new job involves a simple code change and a few tests, and thats it. Alternatively, stick to only interviewing candidates who know Ruby. Well dive into each of these pieces below to explain how Airflow mediated this transition. A recruiter followed up within two days and we did a call to discuss qualifications. This question can help the interviewer determine if you have the skills necessary to succeed in this role. One year later, weve asked them to reflect on their experiences. Im Jesse, a recruiter here at Betterment, and I had the immense pleasure of working closely with these two. Pages are built from a collection of components that are shared across pages, but can be expanded upon or manipulated in the context of the page theyre on. Without getting into the gory details, this essentially requires us, for every test we write, to stub a request for user datawith differences across minor things like ID values, we cant share these stubs between tests. When were communicating with external services, we have less control, but HTTP is the protocol of the web and REST has been around since 2000the dawn of modern web applications so the majority of integrations we build will use them. Option 1: Continue Running R Directly Our first plan was to reuse the research code in R and let it continue to run server-side, building an API on top of the core functions. Granted, having exactly-once semantics would be preferable, but if we cannot be sure that our jobs run at least once, then we must ask ourselves: how would we know if something didnt run at all? Working with our product team, we determined that the minimum amount of change to consider a page rebranded was adoption of the new header, footer, colors, and fonts. We valued sending Slack messages to our engineers, as thats how the company communicates most effectively, but we didnt like the rate of communication or the content of those messages. Designing an Off Ramp Just as we are committed to rolling out large changes in small portions, we are careful to avoid huge changesets on the other side of a release. They dont need to define an error budget policy, and they dont need to take action when they fail their aspirational SLO. At first glance the places where we used #firstname in-app seemed minimalemails, in-app greetings, tax documents. We came up with ACES: Automated, Consistent, Efficient, and Self-serviced as the motifs by which we could create a measurable feedback loop. A bonus of Style Closet is how well its able to host these React components since they can simply be incorporated into a view by being wrapped in a Style Closet component. 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. Once we migrate to Rails 5, we should even be able to easily take advantage of Turbolinks 3, which is a conventionalized way to do regional AJAX updates. We were deeply attracted to the idea of being able to fully integration-test our projections and recommendations working within our actual app (i.e. With that, weve been able to test the integration of all the components for a given flow, all written in widget-test-like style without needing to build out the entire app. If you don't know Ruby + rails, don't bother since it's the only language you're allowed to work with. The last important hurdle is native plugins. These restrictions require us to allow for some portfolio driftsome deviation from the target allocation. Frameworks Galore! Microsoft question - Design an old style mobile phone and search for various names based on key press. Lets run the first cop, Betterment/UnscopedFind against DocumentsController from above: $ rubocop app/controllers/documents_controller.rb Inspecting 1 file C Offenses: app/controllers/documents_controller.rb:3:17: C: Betterment/UnscopedFind: Records are being retrieved directly using user input. 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. Sops is a great tool by itself, but operations security is hard. These are REALLY basic things that you can do if you have some rails experience, but if its your first time looking at it, you're SOL, and your interviewers will at best try to nudge you to the right documentation page to read mid interview. Just the portfolio transition work alone includes significant new code for front-end enhancements which have nothing to do with trading. Create 1,000 worker instances: With Amazon Cloud Service, we signed up to access time on 1,000 virtual machines. - Phone screen, nice recruiter. This interactive tool was a great start, but it lives in isolation, away from the holistic Betterment experience. Theres no context to orient us quickly to what the notification is for. 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. Our allocation code doesnt need to care that were looking to allocate money, just that were looking to allocate integers. We followed up shortly after with apull requestto patch the second issuechange the behavior of the cop to disallow usages ofsafe_concat. These interviews are in Ruby on Rails - know ruby on rails beforehand, since it is difficult to read / implement on the spot. For many trans folks like myself, this is the name assigned at birth which means all legal and government issued IDs and documents use this non-affirming name. Our goals in standardizing the CI interface were to: Make it easier to distribute new CI features more quickly across the organization. Face ID permissions prompt without (left) and with (right) an NSFaceIDUsageDescription string included in the Info.plist This compatibility mode prompt is undesirable enough on its own, but it also clued us into the need to check for potential security concerns opened up by this forwards-compatibility-by-default from Apple. Since then, the team has met several times to gather feedback and implement tweaks, but the broad strokes have remained unchanged. We can click on any of these links and know exactly where they go based on the logoof the service. Jesse Harrelson: Seriously though, it was the combination of all that plus so many other things. If we used a research-first approach to build RetireGuide, the result could have been a planning tool that was mathematically sound but hard for our customers to use. If you have influence in the hiring process, try to push for candidates who understand and respect these principles of data science. We were able to overcome this and begin filling out the middle level of our testing pyramid by adding structure on top of the widget testing API that allows us to test full flows from start to finish. In order to understand our journey, we first have to establish what secrets management means (and doesnt mean) to us. These questions open up an entirely different can of worms, one that we would prefer remained firmly sealed. The process took 3 weeks. Lets walk through this process for our example: Remember that were working in cents, so our inflow is 123456 and we need to allocate it across bucket weights of [31000, 35000, 20000, 14000]. 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. 2 Alex Hidalgo, Implementing Service Level Objectives. 1. See IRA limits here and 401(k) limits. Write some jobs, pick a queue backend with a few desirable features (priorities, queues, etc), run some job worker processes, and were off to the races! The links to the various services we use are in the same order as our new failure messages, but the link to CircleCI only goes to the workflow that shows the graph of all the tests and jobs that ran. Sopsorific uses the term ecosystem to describe this concept, as well as collectively describe a suite of apps that make up a working Betterment system. In Flutter, the way to write end-to-end tests is with flutter_driver and the integration_test package. By inheriting from this WebValve class, we gain the ability to toggle the fake behavior on or off based on another conventionally-named environment variable, in this case TRADING_ENABLED. Below is a table summarizing Joes holdings: Account Type: VTI (U.S. Total Market) VWOB (Emerging Markets Bonds) Account Total Taxable $5,500 $5,500 $11,000 Roth $2,750 $2,750 $5,500 Asset Class Total $8,250 $8,250 $16,500 To begin to construct our model for an optimal asset location strategy, we need to consider the relative value of each fund in both accounts. We wanted to build a thoughtfully composed platform based on the tried and true principles of12-factor apps. I applied online. If youre interested in hearing me say even more about resilient data persistence and job execution, feel free to check out Can I break this?, a talk I gave at RailsConf 2021! With the interviews in hand, the team sat down to pen a manifest and define pillars by which we would measure our progress. 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. Ive inquired about pay but its gotten nowhere. In Betterments mobile apps, this means including trustworthy but convenient local authentication options for resuming active login sessions. 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. AWS Regions do resilience right. 100+ Betterment Interview Questions & Answers | Glassdoor Lots of STAR method and cultural fit questions. You will need to be passingly familiar with the language they're using. When controllers are thin and models are tested heavily, there should be no need to duplicate business logic test cases from a model spec in a request spec. 10 - 15 min recruiter Q & A - answers any questions about next steps The circles represent various asset classes, and the bar shows the allocation for all the accounts, if added together. Hopefully its easy to look past the trivial nature of using an intand imagine how this might apply to a more complex test case. Points for trying though, right? This employer has claimed their Employer Profile and is engaged in the Glassdoor community. Here was a company that wasnt solely focused on the traditional Computer Science education when hiring an apprentice/junior engineer. Some javascript questions about scoping and how to build an app. Anonymous Interview Candidate in Columbia, MD, I applied online. At Betterment, we build public facing applications without an authorization framework by following three principles, discussed in another blog post. Its just native MySQL master-slave replication; easy to set up and maintain on dedicated hardware or in the cloud. Overall, the process was great. Optimal portfolio management requires managing a portfolio in real-time, including taxes, rebalancing, risk, and circumstantial variables like cashflows. 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. Rolling your own cryptoisnt a great idea. Our dashboards come in a few parts. (Were also assuming he only wants to make at most one visit to each store.) When do we want to give feedback? One of the main reasons I was ecstatic to join Betterment was how I felt throughout the recruiting process. Three years ago, in 2014, we implemented Touch ID support as an alternative to using PIN entry in our iOS app. If there was an issue, how did you handle the situation? It's better to ask a question and move forward with your problem than it is to struggle over an answer. In addition to these two, the Betterlint repository contains other custom cops weve written to enforce certain patterns -- both security related as well as more general ones. This also fosters conversation, natural networking, and the chance for women to get their foot in the door. It eliminated the potential for any code reuse and meant it would take us longer to implement. Faking it left as much of our code as possible under test. We ran into quite a few issues with flutter_driver though. All crypto keys matchThere are checks to ensure the multi-region KMS key ARNs and backup PGP key fingerprint in the sops config file matches the intended security zones. Sometimes there are a few layers of indirection between a service and a Betterment customer, and it takes a bit of creativity to understand what aspects of the service directly affects them. Decisions, decisions While researching our options, we happened upon a tool calledsops. 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. Under the covers, request specs are just a thin wrapper around Rails integration tests. Thanks to Uncruft, once I generated that initial map of deprecations the large foundational work stream could then be further split into smaller brooks of work that could be tackled by different squads at different times. Here are the top interview tools for software engineers, along with everything you need to know before making a decision on which solution to buy: pricing, implementation, candidate experience, etc. Translating the problem into code If you want to jump right in, check out the full sample code. These are not leetcode problems, these are asking you to implement functionality using ruby on rails. Separately, they could set up a taxable retirement account invested likewise in 90% stocks and 10% bonds. Code defines how your application behaves. One of our primary aims in building this platform was to increase developer velocity, so we needed to eliminate any friction from commit to deploy. But in the Old World there wasnt enough context to make the message immediately useful. Weve usedUJSsprinkles in similar fashion to the rest of the Rails world over the years, but that has its limitations as we begin to design more complex behaviors and elements of our apps. Every component is on brand and consistent with every other app, feels polished, high quality and requires lower effort to implement. Model specs have a live database connection, but we like to think of our model specs as unit tests. sopsorific runis another custom command we built to make our usage of sops seamless. I cherished the opportunity and the challenge that comes with building with code. 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. Answer Example: "As a junior software engineer, I believe the most . Betterment Engineering Blog We useUpstartto define all Airflow services and simply wrap the TERM behavior in our workers post-stop script, sending the TERM signal first, waiting until we see the Celery process stopped, then finally poweroff the machine. One area we need to be conscious of is how we render HTML. Rule #2: Controllers should pass ActiveRecord models, rather than ids, into the model layer. This part will come off as if I'm full of myself, but my tech skills are fine. You might guess that you can express it as follows: The above statements assert that the sum of the balances of VTI across Joes accounts must be equal to half of his total balance. That keeps us moving fast and not breaking things. However, in Airflow we reversed our thinking to embrace DMS, using Airflows sensor operators to wait for rows to be pushed from DMS before carrying on with dependent tasks. Search. I interviewed at Betterment. Ive inquired about pay but its gotten nowhere. Then, we took it even further. 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. You may be thinking, isnt this a simple math problem? Glassdoor users rated their interview experience at Betterment as 47.0% positive with a difficulty rating score of 2.82 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty). 16.0availableacrossallstores. We built our own internal framework for modeling mathematical programs that was not tied to our trading systems domain-specific business logic. The beginning of our Flutter testing journey Up until early 2020, our mobile app was entirely native with separate android and iOS codebases. Throughout the process, we identified several discrepancies between JavaScript and R function outputs, so we regularly reconciled the differences. These in turn led to lengthy investigations that consumed a lot of valuable development time. School has taught me nothing. Also, the flutter_driver API worked differently than the screen testing API and was generally more difficult to use. Fidel Severino: The people. We also have a few heftier integration tests to confirm our expectations. Please query for the associated record in a way that enforces authorization (e.g. Three Things I Learned In My Engineering Internship I knew I had a lot to learn about how a Web app works, but I never imagined that it involved as much as it does. Development & Deployment We mimic our production cluster as closely as possible for development & testing to identify any issues that may arise with multiple workers. So, at the very least, we need the guarantee of at-least-once execution. 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. Our reliance on background jobs even allows us to guarantee the eventual consistency of our distributed systems, but more on that later. I had two exceptional mentors who went above and beyond and removed any blocks preventing me from accomplishing tasks.
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