betterment software engineer interview

We sent out questionnaires in advance but collected answers through face-to-face dialogue. On the other end of the spectrum there are no tests at all; YOLO, just ship-it. But Does It Scale? By going down the path of integration testing, weve been able to increase confidence in everyday changes as well as map out a plan for eliminating our manual test cases. Use SQLite database to be efficient The best way to store the user transaction objects was to use JSON, a human-readable representation of Java objects. With integration testing being a key level of the testing pyramid, we needed to find a way to test how features in our app interacted without the overhead involved with setting up UI tests. We use a multi-threaded web server for our production application, and so when we make a call into the Julia shared library, we push that call onto a queue where it gets picked up and performed by a single executor thread which then communicates the result back to the calling thread using apromiseobject. Microsoft question - Design an old style mobile phone and search for various names based on key press. The second of these issues was that the cop prevented usages ofrawandhtmlsafe, but did not prevent usages ofsafeconcat. 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. The first step in this translation was to deprecate our not-very-descriptively named #firstname method and push engineers to start using two new, descriptive methods called #legalfirstname and #commonfirstname (#commonfirstname is essentially a defaulting method that falls back to #legalfirstname if #preferredfirst_name is not present for that user). The solutions that come out of that awareness are game-changing. To set up a new app all you need to do is be in the directory for your project and then runcoach create project --type $project_type. Excel 2013 is capped at just more than 1 million rows. New York City Metropolitan Area. The server is responsible for knowing about (1) our data, (2) how to wrap that data into rich domain models that own our business logic, (3) how to render those models into views, and (4) how to render those views on the page. We are hoping that by using these patterns, we can limit our use of JavaScript to only know about how to enhance HTML, not how toautomatically calculate net income when trying to distribute excess tax year contributions from an IRA (something that our frontend JavaScript used to know how to do). First was with 2 members on the team, last was with a manager. Because its in source control and it runs through its own CI process, we can also easily roll out changes to notifications without breaking things. What is an SLO? When before it could take days or weeks to add a new step to a CI pipeline, now it takes hours of simple code review. Putting it alltogether Our configuration generator is doing a lot more than just taping together jobs in a workflowwe evaluate dependency graphs and only run certain jobs that have upstream changes or are triggered themselves. How is their IT department for roles like Director or VP? Secrets management does NOT mean attempting to write our own crypto libraries or cipher algorithms. Fidel Severino: Oh man! Most analyses contain too many important detailed steps to plausibly communicate in an email or during a meeting. Another option is to start tracking the level of operational complexity for their systems. TL;DRWebValve is an open-source gem that uses Sinatra and WebMock to provide fake HTTP service behavior. iOS had a larger unit testing suite than android did, but neither had integration tests. So even if your queue lives in an entirely separate datastore, it can be effectively coupled to your DB's IOPS and CPU limitations. Any insights would be helpful. In sops, weve found a tool that combines all of these things enabling a workflow that makes secrets management easier. How did you overcome that feeling? Note that the error path and two common success paths are exercised in the same spec. It should just work unless there are secrets that have different values than already configured in the default file. As a corollary to Rule #1, we should ensure that all authorization happens in the controller by disallowing model initialization with *_id attributes. This resulted in app code (the content-specific code) becoming entangled with system (the base HTML) code. In system specs, each test is wrapped in a database transaction because its run within a Rails process, which means we dont need to use the DatabaseCleaner gem anymore. Additionally, all components can take a block, which is typically the content for the component. 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. Next, we need a View, that represents our form for editing the address. In practice, that might look something like this: Resulting in a function for which the fact that the underlying implementation is in Julia has been completely abstracted away: Challenges & Pitfalls Debugging an FFI integration can be challenging; any misconfiguration is likely to result in the dreadedsegmentation faultthe cause of which can be difficult to hunt down. Server JavaScript: A Single-Page App ToA Single-Page App Betterment engineers recently migrated a single-page backbone app to a server-driven Rails experience. I applied online. So how do we narrow this feature spec down to something like this? Im not talking about spoken languages. Secondly, we need to define the boundaries in terms of contracts. Contracts are a point of exchange between the consumption side (the app) and producer side (the collaborator service). It may be surprising then to learn that we actually went with Option 2. This is why Betterment has a rule requiring UUIDs for all new tables. Instead of multiple interviewers asking a candidate about the same questions based on their resum, we prescribe topics based on the most important core competencies of successful (Betterment) engineers. 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. Given requirements and interface, provide an implementation Cost-Effective Scalability Since our processing needs fluctuate throughout the day, we were paying for computing power we didnt actually need during non-peak times on a single machine, as shown in our Luigi servers load. All return examples and return figures mentioned above are for illustrative purposes only. And, yes, you heard that right. 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. Where are we authorizing the users access to those parameters? I was on the verge of taking another internship in educational technology, commonly referred to as edtech. But when I got the opportunity to work at Betterment, a rapidly growing company, I had to take it. We still lacked a good way to share markup across all our apps. These were some of the questions we asked ourselves during this part of the design phase. Otherwise, wed be putting a sweet new set of tires on a car that wont start! When jobs run, they emit ActiveSupport::Notification events that we subscribe to and then forward along to a StatsD emitter, typically as distribution or increment metrics. 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. 31 Software Engineering Interview Questions With Answers - Springboard Blog 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. 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. In our app we use dio and not dart:io's built-in HTTP client mostly due to preference and slight feature set differences. 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. Fidel Severino: Im originally from the Dominican Republic and moved to the United States at age 15. the application or models in question dont have a concept of private data The flagged code isnt actually insecure: e.g. First was with 2 members on the team, last was with a manager. I interviewed at Betterment (New York, NY). A nice property that weve observed at Betterment, and that might apply to you as well, is that the number of jobs tends to scale proportionally with the number of customers and accounts. These arent necessarily true-to-form SLOs but engineers can use this framework and tooling provided to collect data around how their systems are operating and have conversations on prioritization based on what they discover, beginning to build a culture of observability and accountability Conclusion Betterment is at a point in its growth where prioritization has become more difficult and more important. This was mainly because they were faster to run than request specs. Given requirements and interface, provide an implementation The data is too large, the analyses are too complex, and mistakes are too dangerous to trust to our dear old friend the spreadsheet. 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. 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 cant split a penny into fractions, so we cant give your college savings fund the exact proportional amount. Everyone was very open about what they thought about the company and about what their experience at the company was like. There needs to be a way to set up a new project. Well, when building web applications, we (as web application developers) strive to build pages that respond quickly and reliably to web requests. One of the things we chatted about after the talk was how empowering it is to have the resources and movements of our generation to bring more diversity to the tech industry. About that fake HTTP thing One of the most interesting bits of this solution is the way we inject a fake HTTP configuration into our network stack. More broadly, a 2015 survey of large businesses in the UK reported that 17% had experienced direct financial losses because of spreadsheet errors. Finding and Preventing Rails Authorization Bugs This article walks through finding and fixing common Rails authorization bugs. 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. If theyre in our codebase, we should be able to iterate on the fakes without having to restart our server; the behavior isnt always right the first time, and restarting is tedious and it's not the Rails Way. New York City: $135,000 - $155,000. Testing our Rails applications allows us to build features more quickly and confidently by proving that code does what we think it should, catching regression bugs, and serving as documentation for our code. What is legacy code? It is a read-write schema to which our colleagues have full privileges. Betterment interview details in New York City, NY: 37 interview questions and 35 interview reviews posted anonymously by Betterment interview candidates. By incorporating many of these practices, it is steadily becoming more and more fun to develop on the Betterment platform. How We Built Betterment's Retirement Planning Tool in R and JavaScript Engineering Betterments new retirement planning tool meant finding a way to translate financial simulations into a delightful Web experience. We implemented a local fallback mixin for Airflow maintained hooks that uses the local filesystem for development and testing, deferring to the actual hooks remote functionality only on production. When we set up a new plugin and we wrap it in a class that we inject into our app. 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. High quality code. The props are a fancier attr_accessor with the bonus of being able to assign defaults. I applied through a recruiter. Meet Joe Joe is a hypothetical Betterment customer. But the era of the spreadsheet is over. Meanwhile, if our queue existed in a separate datastore, our enqueues will be completely unaware of the transaction, and wed run the risk of enqueuing a job that acts on data that was never committed, or (even worse) wed fail to enqueue a job even when the rest of the transactional data was committed. This summer, I had the privilege of participating in a software engineering internship with Betterment. If youve heard one thing about Julia, its probably about its blazingly fast performance. We like to evaluate how well a candidate explains the design decisions and progress from one interviewer to the next. Ill just use Betterment. Got the first interview in about 3 weeks. This interactive tool was a great start, but it lives in isolation, away from the holistic Betterment experience. I have experience in several different backend/ frontend frameworks, yet rails has some specific quirks, and your interviewers will not help you in this regard, but will simply try to see how you figure out, so they basically force you to google mid interview, and set you on a timer. 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. Julia solves this issue by making it very simple to take a piece of research code and refactor it for production use. If the value forprojecttypeisruby_appthen the.circleci/config.ymlgenerator will follow certain conventions for Ruby programs, like including a job to run tests withRSpecor including a job to run static analysis commands likeRubocopandBrakeman. Copyright 2008-2023, Glassdoor, Inc. "Glassdoor" and logo are registered trademarks of Glassdoor, Inc. If youre writing tests for your Flutter application, its safe to assume that your goal is to build a robust, reliable piece of software that you can be confident in. The process took 3 weeks. Whether its a database query, a Web-scraping function, a MapReduce job, or a PDF extraction, script it and include it in your reproducible process. Complete a pair programming exercise consisting of some starter code and finishing out a key function. What I mean by fake plugins is really simple. Since the first test will always run before the second test, were not privy to this dependency. Making a fake implementation of that plugin is typically as easy as making another class, prefixing its name with Fake and having it implement the public contract of the regular plugin class with suitably real but not quite real behavior. What to Use, and How Short answer: R or Python. In this case, our fourth bucket and second bucket, respectively, are most deserving. The process took 7 weeks. Be the first to find this interview helpful. 3) 6 hour onsite. This article is part of Engineering at Betterment. Instead of using a client side MVC framework to help enable us to write a single page app, we opted to use our Rails server to render views, and we used server generated JavaScript responses to make the app feel just as snappy for our customers. Discussion Finally, weve added an Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) sessionanother idea provided by our Women in Technology group. 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. Build extra time into project estimates Legacy code can also be tricky when it comes to project estimates. Interested in engineering at Betterment? Well go into contributing to our platform in more detail below. Julia has excellent support for technical computing and mathematical modelling. A controller-level hook allowed us to easily distinguish which views were to display opt-out mode with a single line of code. Julia ticks the box for this requirement as well by using ajust-in-time compilerthat accommodates both interactive and non-interactive workflows well. Building those small, tight-knit groups promotes relationships that can help the company over time. The main exception to these guidelines is when your controller is an API controller serving data to another app. This rule speaks to the broader goal of authorization being obvious in our code. Weve also covered how our custom cops can help developers avoid antipatterns, resulting in safer and easier to read code. The flag takes a seed that can be one of two things, either a 32 bit unsigned integer or the word random. 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). We found just a few hardware type queues to be effective. While optimizing for code reuse is generally desirable, rewriting our financial models in JavaScript benefited the product in two noticeable ways: It increased testing and organizational understanding. These include the ability for apps to share a job queue but run separate workers (i.e. . Maybe their on-call is really busy, maybe there are a lot of manual interventions needed to keep their services running, maybe theyre still putting out fires and building out their teams systems. The process took 2 weeks. We offer a competitive equity package, health, dental and vision benefits, and a 401 (k) offering with employer match as well as flexible PTO policy. Each account has a 70/30 allocation, and the accounts will add up to 70/30 in the aggregate, but we can do better when it comes to maximizing after-tax returns. Before diving head first into the code, we made it a priority to be cognizant of the engineering challenges we would face. Solution Street has been evolving. We are so lucky to have you! The novelty of our approach was to essentially build partial, precise scaffolding around our current platform. Weve extended the gem with information on erroring jobs (jobs that are in the process of retrying but have not yet permanently failed), as well as the ability to filter by additional fields such as job name, priority, and the owning team (which we store in an additional column). 1 Betterment Junior Software Engineer interview questions and 1 interview reviews. Once a new registration event is received, the registry server opens a pull request to the Julia registry. 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. - Final interview, stay on one project, swap groups of different interviewers. At first glance the places where we used #firstname in-app seemed minimalemails, in-app greetings, tax documents. This might seem like a show stopper, but we get around it by negating our objective function, minimizing, and then negating the results. It is your responsibility to evaluate the accuracy, reliability, timeliness and completeness of any information available on a linked website. If we receive a request for a URL we didn't define, it will 404. If one team member is on vacation you have to wait to set up an interview with them as well. I thought my 5 year was going to finally show something but it did not. As a result, in addition to learning how well a candidate can write code, we learn how well they collaborate. The process took 3 weeks. I started reading Robert Shillers Finance and the Good Society, a book my dad recommended to me months earlier. 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. If you have been using the randomization flag since the inception of your codebase, youre in a fantastic position and can be confident in your tests!

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