One of these things was having an opinionated tool to help us manage secrets helped to make sure we didnt accidentally leave around low-entropy secrets from when we were developing or testing out a feature. 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. For example, consider a request spec for our Documents::AttachmentsController: These test cases are an inexpensive way to prove to yourself and your reviewers that youve considered the authorization context of your controller action and accounted for it properly. Lets cover operability first. 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. 17.0availableacrossallstores. Or they can define some SLOs around types of on-call tasks that their team tackles each week. 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. In that case, we would just need to define the secrets that have different values in a separate secrets file likedevintest.ymlbelow wheredevintestis the name of the ecosystem. You will work with an interviewer for a pair programming experience. And this bounty of information helps a lot if the engineer has multiple PRs open and needs to quickly switch context. The team uses R to rapidly prototype financial simulations and visualize the results, taking advantage of Rs built-in statistical functions and broad set of pre-built packages. Each file was also named algorithmically to allow us to refer back to it and do granular audits of each run. Dozens of engineers contribute to our biggest repository every day and as the code base and engineering team have grown, the complexity of our CI story has increased and our existing pipeline couldnt keep up. 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. To make this fake work, all we have to do is define the conventionally-named environment variable, TRADINGAPIURL. Second, flutter_driver is more about UI/E2E testing rather than integration testing, meaning wed need to run an instance of the app on a device, navigate to a flow we wanted to test, and then test the flow. 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. Another option is to start tracking the level of operational complexity for their systems. When before it could take weeks of both product engineering and SRE time to set up CI for an application or service within a complex ecosystem of bash scripts and Jenkins jobs and application configuration, now it takes minutes. It is a read-only, star-schema representation of fact and dimensional tables for growth subject areas. 4.5 hr virutal onsite - three 45 min tech interviews with 15 - 30 min breaks. Building those small, tight-knit groups promotes relationships that can help the company over time. What are the principles that your team share? Form small groups: People are more open to talking closely with smaller groups than a large discussion roundtable. Okay, weve got an app, a test harness, and robots to interact with the screens. The content on this page is reflective of a specific point in time (as of the publication date). This approach puts candidates at ease, and feels closer to typical pair programming than one might expect. I dont hear anyone saying that expensive proprietary data solutions are the future. This is a great way to get a good signal while reducing unnecessary noise. Check out more error budget math here. On the way out, GSON would re-inflate the JSON back into Java objects, using dummy values for the irrelevant fields, providing us with test inputs ready to be pushed through our system. Everyone from Betterment is proud of the company and work they have done there, which made my decision not join really difficult. 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. Sops is a great tool by itself, but operations security is hard. 1 Betterment Software Engineer Internal Tools interview questions and 1 interview reviews. Maintain a tight feedback loop The team follows an agile process familiar to modern technology organizations. How is their IT department for roles like Director or VP? How is their IT department for roles like Director or VP? sopsorific runis another custom command we built to make our usage of sops seamless. At Betterment, were usingJuliato power the projections and recommendations we provide to help our customers achieve their financial goals. Well dive into each of these pieces below to explain how Airflow mediated this transition. Write unit tests for a piece of the method, then refactor that piece. To be more concrete about this, lets define some variables. These include the ability for apps to share a job queue but run separate workers (i.e. 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 example, a group named when a user is logged in tells me that the group of tests relies upon a user in the authenticated state. Microsoft question - Design an old style mobile phone and search for various names based on key press. These are our decision variablesvariables that were trying to solve for. Isolate the right information With this abstraction, we were able to isolate the absolute core objects that we need to perform trades, and ignore the rest. What areas are you looking to grow in? We wrote tests around the methods in question. Either the code is poorly designed, the code has no tests around it to specify its behavior, or both. Recruiter was great in connecting me with more engineers and managers to get more insight onto the role and culture. Development on these is concurrent, sometimes impacting global objects and schemas, and it was essential to insulate the team working on core trading functionality from all other development being done at the company. At Betterment, our end goal is to always combine both. 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. In just a few weeks, Betterment is launching an updated portfolio -- one that has been optimized for better expected returns. A Guide to the Software Engineer Interview Process - Indeed I did not get the offer but I would have declined as I was offered a position from two other companies. This meant when the designs were changed, we needed to find all of the places this code was used to update it. The name Betterment jumped out at me on a job listings page because it sounded like it would make my life better. Betterment is a financial technology, or fintech, company; while it provides financial services, its an engineering company at its core. Without any further ado, here areBetterments Engineering Principles. Heres a simplified version of our upstart configuration. On Fishbowl, you can share insights and advice anonymously with Betterment employees and get real answers from people on the inside. We talked to other developers who might be more familiar with it. Legacy code can take a long time to properly test and remove. I interviewed at Betterment (New York, NY) in Jan 2023. The benefit we found in flutter_driver was that we could run it in our production-like environment against preset test users. It was built out over the past few years, with many different paradigms and patterns. In the end, we landed on our own flavor of a pair programming interview. Im going to take you through our testing journey from a limited native automated testing suite and heavy dependence on manual testing, to trying flutters integration testing solutions, to ultimately deciding to build out our own framework to increase confidence in the integration of our components. Ship It Our first run of this new process took place in November 2015. In Summary Unlike authentication, authorization is context specific and difficult to abstract away from the leaf nodes of application code. In the end, we landed on our own flavor of a pair programming interview. What does it mean to escapecontent? Building out the user interface. Were running Airflows database on AmazonsRelational Database Serviceand using AmazonsElasticachefor Redis queuing. SLOs in code Now that we have our metrics flowing, our engineers can define SLOs. Happy paths are non-exceptional flows (flows not based on bad user state or input). We needed to make decisions at a granular level, test how they affected the big picture, and then adjust accordingly. By doing this, we can ensure that when we release a patch or minor version of one of our packages, we can ensure that it wont break any packages that depend on it at registration time. This brought up another problem (and the starting point for this blog post): in order to ensure tight feedback loops, we strongly believed that our devs should be able to do their work on a modern, modestly-specced laptop without internet connectivity. We use cutting-edge technology to build cutting-edge technology. All the info I provided is given to you at the time of the interview. Its also ok to assert that the database was changed in some way in a request spec, but like system specs, there is no need for detailed assertions around object state or business logic. 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. The flag takes a seed that can be one of two things, either a 32 bit unsigned integer or the word random. Uncertainty like this makes it hard to build new and awesome features into a product. 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. Please query for the associated record in a way that enforces authorization (e.g. For example, 99.9% of requests complete with a 2xx, 3xx or 4xx HTTP code within 2000ms over a 30 day period The service level indicator (SLI) in this example is a request completing with a status code of 2xx, 3xx or 4xx and with a response time of at most 2000ms. Getting the infrastructure into a production-ready format took a bit of tweaking, but we are now starting to realize a lot of the benefits we hoped for when setting out on this journey, including faster development of production ready models, and a clear separation of responsibilities between the SMEs on the Investing team who are best suited for designing and specifying the models, and the engineering team who have the knowledge on how to scale that code into a production-grade library. Best Prompt Engineering Practice Tests & Interview Questions As our team has grown impressively from five to more than 50 engineers (and this was just in the last three years), weve significantly improved our abilities to make clearer hiring decisions, as well as shortened our total hiring timeline. Meetings thus far have included a panel discussion on breaking into tech from the corporate world and a small-group financial discussion led by financial experts from Betterment and beyond. Copyright 2008-2023, Glassdoor, Inc. "Glassdoor" and logo are registered trademarks of Glassdoor, Inc. We left this outside of application code so that teams can modify SLO target goals and details without having to redeploy the application itself. Weve gotten such an enthusiastic response about designing future events around issues that women (and everyone!) In the process of adopting sops and building sopsorific, we discovered the welcoming community and thoughtful maintainers of sops. Below is an example request spec. We write our tests, called specs (short for specification) with RSpec and Capybara. The result would let us offer a permanent home for our retirement advice that would be always on for our end customers. For a basic example, you generally wont need to save a record to the database to test a validation. Optimal Testing Because we use these three different categories of specs, its important to keep in mind what each type of spec is for to avoid over-testing. I applied online. We chose to fake the http client since it is the very edge of our network layer. Following the principle of least privilege, our engineering team leads are app owners of the specific applications they maintain. In order to build this, we needed to do two overhauls: 1) Build a new CI pipeline and 2) Build a new CD pipeline. Not even knowing we didn't do it very bad. Keeping our overhead low, while delivering top-of-the-line portfolio analysis and optimization is a key way we keep investment fees as low as possible. 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. 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. So does the delayed approach scale? But so is reliability and performance. By the way, this is a topic I could talk about endlessly, so Ill leave it there for now. All return examples and return figures mentioned above are for illustrative purposes only. This page is operated and maintained by Betterment Holdings Inc. and it is not associated with Betterment LLC or MTG LLC. 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. And leaving it up to engineers to own their own configuration lets folks modify the file in an unsupported way which could break their CI process. 1. Engineering at Betterment: Do You Have to Be a Financial Expert? The last part of defining our SLOs is including a date when we plan to revisit that SLO specification. If we dont escape content properly, we could open ourselves and our customers up to security risks. If you havent, theres no better time to start than now. As an added bonus, since our CI process itself was defined in code, if we ever need to switch platforms again, it would be much easier. Rather than getting together to hear presentations, meetups are designed to have a group-led dynamic. Perhaps the simplest is to have the Ruby side allocate the memory into which the Julia function should write its result (and pass the Julia function a pointer to that memory). What could happen if we dont escapecontent? Then, we took it even further. Instead, we automated the test setup by building tools that could snapshot our input data as of the time the error occurred. Pound of food limits Elaines 12 Georges 8 Jerrys 15 Newmans 17 With the optimizer, the function that we are trying to minimize or maximize is called the objective function. Our first run of this new process took place in November 2015. Some javascript questions about scoping and how to build an app. Dan Kubb has been working as a Senior Staff Software Engineer for Betterment for 393 days. See your immediate impact on our company. We cannot just assign arbitrarily large values to the decision variables due to two restrictions which cannot be violated: Joe must maintain $11,000 in his taxable account and $5,500 in his Roth IRA. Less JavaScript. If youre the first convert, absolutism is probably not the right approach. Product and DesignMeet the other teammates, 5. Overall, I got the impression their interview process is very focused on cultural fit and enthusiasm for the product more than anything else. This process added extra validation, testing, and optimizations, helping us to create the most accurate advice in our end product. 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. Where engineers can experience feedback about their code with delight and simplicity. This can introduce sneaky testing bugs that may not surface until the tests themselves run in random order. This page is operated and maintained by Betterment Holdings Inc. and it is not associated with Betterment LLC or MTG LLC. If its a reasonable addition to CI, our thought is that everyone should benefit. In the rack app, we define the routes we care about for the things we normally would have stubbed in the tests. Common stages of the interview process at Betterment according to 99 Glassdoor interviews include: Find a Great First Job to Jumpstart Your Career, Stand Out From the Crowd With the Perfect Cover Letter, How to Prepare for Your Interview and Land the Job. Testing requires striking a fine balance - we dont want to under-test either. 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. Whether you choose to skip those tests while you work on fixing them so the rest of your team can keep chugging away, or address the issues immediately, the following tips should help you quickly identify where the issues are coming from and how to resolve them. From a design standpoint, executing a preferred name feature was pretty straightforwardwe needed to provide a user with a way to share their preferred name with us, and then start using it. Also, if database changes are part of the project (e.g. 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. The process took 2 days. Any improvements you've brought to your current team? All products, services, and content obtained from a linked website are provided as is without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including, but not limited to, implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, non-infringement, security, or accuracy. We leveraged ActionPack variants built into Rails and feature flags from TestTrack in new ways, ensuring we didnt need to make any architecture changes. 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. Changing the objective function and adding new constraints needed to be easy to do. Each of those smaller components would be the output of specific functions, and each of those functions would be written in code and be tested. All technical questions was real world scenarios that a production systems face, they drilled me pretty good on algo, database design, usage, architecture designs, real world questions, not some random questions from EPI. Google Coding Interview With A Normal Software Engineer It is your responsibility to evaluate the accuracy, reliability, timeliness and completeness of any information available on a linked website. All of these steps, apart from the editing, are transparent to the engineer editing the secret. Be the first to find this interview helpful. Commercial Customer Service Representative. Thankfully, the changes to the Local Authentication framework were done in such a way that we determined there wasnt a security risk, but it did leave a problematic user experience in reaching a potentially-inescapable screen when selecting Dont Allow on the privacy permission prompt. 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. This article is part of Engineering at Betterment. Were working to change thatfor ourselves and our industries. For example, we follow a set of pragmatic design principles drawn from SOLID (also created by Michael Feathers) to help ensure code quality. The whole talk is worth a watch, but one idea that really resonated with us is that programming language designand programming language choiceis a reflection of what the end-users of that language value and not a reflection of the objective superiority of one language over another. We cannot assign Joe more money than he already has, nor can we move money between his Roth IRA and taxable accounts. Timeline Another change is that the entire onsite interview is completed in a single day. You may have noticed that unlike the previous example, the vulnerable code doesnt directly reference a params.permit call or any of the parameter names, but the code was still flagged. What all of these tasks had in common (aside from being, well, really important to our business) is that they were executed via a database-backed job-execution framework called Delayed, a newly-open-sourced library that were excited to announce right now, as part of this blog post! Okay brass tacks. While running R server-side is a win on code-reuse, its a loss on scalability and user experience. In a few anecdotes throughout your talk, you mentioned the importance of having mentors and role models. We find each integer quotient and remainder by multiplying the inflow by the weight and dividing by the total weight. 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. As our team has grown impressively from five to more than 50 engineers (and this was just in the last three years), weve significantly improved our abilities to make clearer hiring decisions, as well as shortened our total hiring timeline. 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) Our server then gets an AJAX rest request as usual, but instead of rendering the data as JSON, it responds to the request with a snippet of JavaScript. Testing When writing request specs for a controller action, write a negative test case to prove that attempts to circumvent your authorization measures return a 404. To process registration events, we maintain a registry server on an EC2 instance provisioned throughTerraform, so updates to the configuration are as easy as running a single `terraform apply` command. Make a feature or two. Heres an example configuration section for a single job, the linter job for our Coach repository: https://gist.github.com/agirlnamedsophia/4b4a11acbe5a78022ecba62cb99aa85a And heres an example of the Ruby code that helps generate that result: https://gist.github.com/agirlnamedsophia/a96f3a79239988298207b7ec72e2ed04 For each job that is defined in the.circleci/config.ymlfile, according to the project types list of acceptance criteria, we include additional steps to handle notifications and test reporting. Questions were in JavaScript, ruby on rails, and React having to implement specific features into a pre developed app. . 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. 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. If you don't know Ruby + rails, don't bother since it's the only language you're allowed to work with. 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. Interviews. Heres what an example Ruby appscoach.ymllooks like: https://gist.github.com/agirlnamedsophia/2f966ab69ba1c7895ce312aec511aa6b The CLI will refer back to a projectscoach.ymlto decide what kind of CircleCI DSL needs to be written to the.circleci/config.ymlfile to wire up the right jobs to run at the right time. Fortunately, Airflow already maintains a wide selection ofhooksto work with remote sources such as S3. Dont Do By keeping test dependencies tightly scoped to where theyre used, we avoid the possibility that a test will be added or changed in such a way that impacts the tests previously consuming the dependency. Critical feedback your past manager would give you. This post is part of series of articles written by Betterments 2013 summer interns. Instead of simply instructing and watching candidates as they program, interviewers can now work with them on a real-world problem, and they take turns in control of the keyboard. Our hope is that linking out to this post and its associated Rules will reinforce a strong security posture in our application development. 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. Coachwas designed and built with these principles: Standardize the pipelinethere should be one way to test code, and one way to deploy it Test code oftencode should be tested as often as its committed Build artifacts oftencode should be built as often as its tested so that it can be deployed at any time Be environment agnosticartifacts should be built in an environment-agnostic way with maximum portability Give consistent feedbackthe CI output should be consistent no matter the language runtime Shorten the feedback loopengineers should receive actionable feedback as soon as possible Standardizing CI was critical to our growth as an organization for a number of reasons. Non-CPU intensive tasks (e.g. We created a variant for our rebrand, which would be exposed based on the status of our new feature flag. Instead of four analysts all inventing their own method for loading and cleaning a table of users, you can share as a group the utils/LoadUsers() function and ensure you are talking about the same people at every meeting. During your interview, the interviewer may use your resume and cover letter as a reference to guide questions and additional interview topics. Lets assume that a User has many Attachments that can be attached to a Document they own. 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. To do good data work today, you need to use a system that is reproducible, versionable, scalable, and open. Too tough to call. 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.) Test, repeat, test. Namely, the guarantee of at-least-once execution. Github pull request reviews do software change management right. The process took 2 months. Such linked websites are not monitored, investigated, or checked for accuracy or completeness by Betterment. It is a historical archive and is not intended to be updated. Bootstrapping is a process by which you take random chunks of historical data and re-order it. 31 Software Engineering Interview Questions With Answers - Springboard Blog Below is an example of one of our components, the flash. Weve explored two new rules to encourage best practices when it comes to authorization in our application controllers: Authorization should happen in the controller and should emerge naturally from table relationships originating from the authenticated user, i.e.