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. By the way, this is a topic I could talk about endlessly, so Ill leave it there for now. What value does a Technical program manager brings to a team? Betterment is a great company to work for culture wise (as I mentioned) but unfortunately the total comp is not very competitive. SLOs (service level objectives) - including managing their error budgets - will permit us - our product engineering teams - to have the right conversations and make the right decisions about prioritization and resourcing so that we can balance our efforts spent on reliability and new product features, helping to ensure the long term happiness and confidence of our users (and engineers). These tests are pretty easy to write (just as easy as regular widget tests) but hard-ish to debug and very slow to run. CI/CD: Shortening the Feedback Loop As we improve and scale our CD platform, shortening the feedback loop with notifications was a small, effective, and important piece. Make sure our engineers dont mute their slack notifications In leaving the Old World of inconsistent and contextually sparse communication we looked at our blank canvas and initially thought every time the tests pass, send a notification! 2021 Betterment Holdings Inc. We're not just writing code. Its worth noting that in our case, were using Rubys sort_by method, which gives us a nondeterministic order in the case where remainders are equal. The benefit of having the option to pass an integer as a seed becomes apparent once you come across a test that fails when run in an order other than that which it was defined. We Scrum, we Git, and we Jenkins. 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. Compile the Julia code into a shared library, and call it directly from Ruby usingFFI. In a few anecdotes throughout your talk, you mentioned the importance of having mentors and role models. But at one point (fairly recently, honestly), it just clicked that I knew what I was doing. I had a very pleasant experience interviewing with the team at Betterment. It is also important in our research code where the iterative nature of research means we often have to re-run financial simulations or models multiple times with slight tweaks. Now lets try running Betterment/AuthorizationInController on the AttachmentLink example from earlier: $ rubocop app/controllers/documents/attachments_controller.rb Inspecting 1 file C Offenses: app/controllers/documents/attachments_controller.rb:3:24: C: Betterment/AuthorizationInController: Model created/updated using unsafe parameters. This new flexible set of asset allocations significantly affects our current trading processes. It allows room for future growth which will inevitably happen. There are plenty of other features that weve built that havent made it into the delayed gem quite yet. Were continually evaluating whether to adopt this process for other roles, as well. ): The New World is cleaner, easier to grok, and more immediately helpful: The link title to GitHub is the commit diff itself, and it takes you to the compare URL for that changeset. Make a feature or two. Separation of concerns between how we accessed data in our system and the business logic defining algorithmic behavior. This approach puts candidates at ease, and feels closer to typical pair programming than one might expect. However, reimplementing our financial models in a very different language exposed a number of engineering concerns. Luckily, we can use Rubys powerful metaprogramming abilities to abstract all that awaycreating a declarative way to wrap an arbitrary Julia function which results in a familiar and easy-to-use interface for Ruby developers. The benefit we found in flutter_driver was that we could run it in our production-like environment against preset test users. Whats the best way to have a lack of compensation and incentive conversation in your department? We now rely on Rubocops Rails/OutputSafety cop (instead of our custom cop) to help ensure that our team is making good decisions about escaping HTML content. Betterment interview details: 102 interview questions and 87 interview reviews posted anonymously by Betterment interview candidates. At Betterment, instead of picking pounds of ingredients from a given store, we are using it to piece together a mix of securities, in order to keep us compliant with certain regulatory specifications. This question can help the interviewer understand how you approach a project and what your thought process is. When I started at Betterment (the company) five years ago, Betterment (the platform) was a monolithic Java application. Request specs for APIs are owned by the consuming apps team to ensure that the invariants that they expect to hold are not broken. If you had prior experience with these languages the problems are easy to solve. The input data was serialized and automatically fed back into our test fixtures. Being that Java only covered a small piece of this structure, I had a lot of languages to learn. Can we talk about why you decided to become an Engineer? On average, Dan Kubb works for one company for 5 years 1 month. 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. Discussion Finally, weve added an Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) sessionanother idea provided by our Women in Technology group. While we love the concern that our engineers show toward solving these problems, these deviations became problematic for applications of the same runtime that should abide by the same set of rules; for example, all Ruby apps should runRSpecandRubocop, not just some of them. We employed the m1.small instances, relying on the quality of quantity. "With a few key exceptions" If the first important distinction of end-to-end-ish tests is that they don't run on a real device with flutter_driver, the second important distinction is that they don't rely on a real backend API. Jesse Harrelson, a Betterment Software Engineer, not only leads our hosting events, they found a path to Betterment through Women Who Code. All of the code that handles changesets and messaging logic in the New World is written in one central location, and its tested in isolation. All teams at Betterment are responsible for teasing apart complex financial concepts and then presenting them in a coherent manner, enabling our customers to make informed financial decisions. 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. I feel like if the tone was set immediately, or if i just got an email rejection, it would've hurt a lot less, but it was so cheery up until the "unfortunately we have decided not to move forward with your application" that it hit like a sack of bricks. On the other hand, some methods are just a means for us to mark content as already safe. Make sure that the bulk of the logic youre testing in a model spec is in the method youre exercising (unless the underlying methods are private). I moved to New York after getting an opportunity at Sony and worked for a year producing video content. talked about the company and the role. At Betterment, our end goal is to always combine both. iOS or Android? As weve circled back to clean up these lower-traffic views and give them the full rebrand treatment, weve come closer to deleting the opt_out CSS manifest and deprecating our our legacy stylesheets for good. Complete a pair programming exercise consisting of some starter code and finishing out a key function. Our principles are a living document in an actual git repository that well continue to add to and revise as we learn and grow. Quite a bit more complicated, because each backend framework provides its own set of trade-offs and guarantees, many of which will have far-reaching implications in our codebase. Were continually evaluating whether to adopt this process for other roles, as well. What is the interview process like at Betterment? A Better Way With our new paradigm, we can skip most of this. At Betterment, were usingJuliato power the projections and recommendations we provide to help our customers achieve their financial goals. In order to effectively work on multiple pieces of an app, an engineer needs to be fluent in multiple different languages. Introducing Delayed: Resilient Background Jobs on Rails In the past 24 hours, a Ruby on Rails application at Betterment performed somewhere on the order of 10 million asynchronous tasks. Weve also developed a partnership with Peoplism. I was nervous to work in an industry I knew nothing about. At first glance the places where we used #firstname in-app seemed minimalemails, in-app greetings, tax documents. When a PR is merged, our team takes care of redistributing the new version of the library so engineers can update their configuration. While possible to run in CI, it would be incredibly costly to run on each commit since the tests need to run on actual devices. This increased our computing power by a thousandfold, and buying time is cheap on these machines. Certain snappy user experience elements dont work as well without JavaScript. Create 1,000 worker instances: With Amazon Cloud Service, we signed up to access time on 1,000 virtual machines. query: # (total_events - bad_events) over total_events == good_events/total_events numerator: sum:trace.rack.request.hits{service:coach,env:production,resource_name:deployscontroller_create}.as_count()-sum:trace.rack.request.errors{service:coach,env:production,resource_name:deployscontroller_create}.as_count() denominator: sum:trace.rack.request.hits{service:coach,resource_name:deployscontroller_create}.as_count() We love having these SLOs defined in GitHub because we can track who's changing them, how they're changing, and get review from peers. Consider these principles, along with our current and future open source work, part of our contribution to that conversation. To implement our component system, we created our internal gem, Style Closet. While we want to iterate rapidly, we strive to never compromise the security of our customers nor the correctness of our code. In this model there is no single controller. As such, our technical interviews switched from whiteboards to computers. 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. It helps to make specs more readable and easier to fix if they break because of a UI or CSS change. If our SLOs dont align directly with business objectives and needs, they should align indirectly via tracking operational complexity and maturity. This employer has claimed their Employer Profile and is engaged in the Glassdoor community. Its nice to give candidates a short break in between interviews, but the main reason for the separation is to evaluate the handoff. Option 1 is a very common pattern, and actually quite similar to what had been the status quo at Betterment, as most of the projections and recommendation code existed in a JavaScript service. Lets call it resilience. 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. Note that the contribution limits mentioned in this example are as of the time this article was published. We decided it was necessary to be told onlyoncewhen everything ran successfully. We can do this migration in small pieces. Development & Deployment We mimic our production cluster as closely as possible for development & testing to identify any issues that may arise with multiple workers. Effectively, this means maintaining only a baseline level of workers throughout the day and scaling up during peaks when our workload increases. Too little testing doesnt give any confidence in system behavior and does not protect against regressions. Please query for the associated record in a way that enforces authorization (e.g. 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. Define our process For us the obvious first order of business was to deliver continuous, incremental value and gradual transition from legacy systems to new ones. We wrote tests around the methods in question. In person pair programming was in Ruby only. The Results? And then youll probably want to expose a way for Ruby to instruct Julia to clean up that reference (i.e. For more information about working at Betterment, please visit our Careers page. Do This will correctly print A,B,C,A,D,E (A prints twice because setUpis run before each test) Tip 3: Scope test objects as closely as possible to the tests that need them In the same way that we prefer to keep shared state as low in the Widget tree as possible, keep your test objects close to the tests that utilize them. Copyright 2008-2023, Glassdoor, Inc. "Glassdoor" and logo are registered trademarks of Glassdoor, Inc. The test runner will print the seed it chose at the beginning of test execution, and you can reliably use that seed to reproduce the failure and be confident in your fix once the test begins passing. By harnessing the power of Amazon Web Services (specifically EC2 and S3) and a cloud-based message queue called IronMQ we reduced that testing time to just six hoursand for a total cost of less than $500. Who are your biggest inspirations in the industry? Combined together we call this aproject_type. Work with nonprofits: Groups like NCWIT, the YWCA, the Anita Borg Institute, the Scientista Foundation, and several others are so great for community outreach and company morale. A PR build failed. I work in Ruby, for example, where the first thing you learn is thateverythingis an object. We already use ACID-compliant datastores to solve these precise kinds of data persistence issues, so with the exception of really, really high volume operations (where a lot of noise and data loss canor mustbe tolerated), theres really no reason not to enqueue jobs co-transactionally with other data changes. 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. Looking for the best java software engineer interview questions to ask candidates during your hiring process? Writing end-to-end tests is pretty expensive. 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. There needs to be a way to set up a new project. This approach puts candidates at ease, and feels closer to typical pair programming than one might expect. Ive inquired about pay but its gotten nowhere. The sample code below illustrates how we generated the constraints for our model. 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. Every component is on brand and consistent with every other app, feels polished, high quality and requires lower effort to implement. This can introduce sneaky testing bugs that may not surface until the tests themselves run in random order. Everyone was really nice and thoughtful and genuinely wanted to know about me. How we did it 1. Just the portfolio transition work alone includes significant new code for front-end enhancements which have nothing to do with trading. In order to have control over that plugin, this app has also made a thin wrapper service for that. You got one notification message when everything succeeded and you still do. https://www.youtube.com/embed/F32QhaHFn1k. In doing all of these things, weve reduced bottlenecks for developers so they can focus more on shipping features and less on managing secrets. Given the changes in Rails and the limitations of controller specs, weve changed our stance. Some javascript questions about scoping and how to build an app. If it would, the user is instead forced to either fix the changes that lead to a downstream breakage, or to modify the registration to be a major version increase. 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. Scalable There are hard technical limits to how large an analysis you can do in a spreadsheet. We knew both of those would need to change. We wanted that same level of flexibility in changing our mathematical model. Get started with your Free Employer Profile. Addition information Since we introduced our internal Rails component code, a fantastic open-source project emerged,Komponent, as well as a really great and in-depth blog post on component systems in Rails fromEvil Martians. At QCon London 2019, Steve Klabnik gave agreat talkon how the developers of the Rust programming language view tradeoffs in programming language design. Any insights would be helpful. A little bit of disclaimer here before we start digging in a little more: I can barely scratch the surface of how solvers work. It's a joke feed, but they have some great tech and security points and articles shared there. Where engineers can experience feedback about their code with delight and simplicity. It is your responsibility to evaluate the accuracy, reliability, timeliness and completeness of any information available on a linked website. The entire process was a month long. There needs to be a way to idempotently generate the CircleCI configuration (.circleci/config.yml) for all the projects in a repo at once. Working here offered me the opportunity to learn about finance while still being immersed in tech startup culture. Vim! Each interviewer knows which competencies (e.g., software craftsmanship) to evaluate. Photo credit: Christine Meintjes Abi: Can you speak about a time in your life where impostor syndrome was limiting in your own career? What areas are you looking to grow in? Below is an example system spec. These are our decision variablesvariables that were trying to solve for. Betterment, I like your company and I will continue using your products, but your onsite interview isn't a test of tech skills, it's a test of Ruby knowledge. Airflowqueuesallow us to designate certain tasks to run on particular hardware (e.g. Next, we find the leftover pennies by taking the inflow minus the total of the integer quotients, which is 123456(38271 + 43209 + 24691 + 17283) = 2. 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. As a Rails shop, we already make heavy use of RuboCop. Hence, WebValve. We acknowledge that many applications out there cant make the same design decisions about users data, but as a general principle we recommend reducing the ways in which that data can be accessed. See IRA limits here and 401(k) limits. The process took 2 weeks. Were happy with the changes to our process, and we feel that it does a great job of fully and honestly evaluating a candidates abilities, which helps Betterment to continue growing its world-class team. Rane Johnson - I met Rane at the Grace Hopper Celebration for Women in Computing in 2011, and then again when I interned at Microsoft in 2012. Onboarding new hires familiar with the Rails framework will be faster, and those who arent familiar can find great external (and internal) resources to learn it. Note that association does not imply authorization, and the onus is on the developer to ensure that associations are used properly. Key Principles for Using Tax Coordination on a Retirement Goal As a result, we wanted to make sure that the software we built respected four key principles, which are: Isolation from third-party solver APIs. CSS (the appearance): In this example, we use it to set things like the color, alignment and the border. Keeping rules #1 and #2 in mind, weve created two cops: Betterment/UnscopedFind and Betterment/AuthorizationInController; these will flag any models being retrieved and created in potentially unsafe ways, respectively. The last straw for using whiteboards came from feedback provided by Betterments Women in Technology group. This rule speaks to the broader goal of authorization being obvious in our code. Mathematically, its straightforward to represent the first restriction as two linear constraints. The view (the structure): a familiar html.erb file that looks very similar to what would exist without a component but a little more flexible since it doesnt have its content hard coded in. Other Improvements We also streamlined our question-asking process and hiring timeline, and added an opportunity for candidates to speak with non-interviewers. Took about an hour or two total. Can you speak to some techniques that have personally proven effective for you in overcoming impostor syndrome? Free interview details posted anonymously by Betterment interview candidates. I applied online. We did the same for outputs, which were also full of noise for our purposes. Create an input queue: We created a bucket with every simulationmore than 200,000we wanted to run. As a result, we had to build features into sopsorific to allow vendor provided secrets that didnt meet the sopsorific standards by default to be accepted by sopsorifics checks. And no one needs to manually edit the.circleci/config.ymlfile again. 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). 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. Were running Airflows database on AmazonsRelational Database Serviceand using AmazonsElasticachefor Redis queuing. As a result, in addition to learning how well a candidate can write code, we learn how well they collaborate. I applied online. But that leaves us with a pretty large gap where it's way too easy for us to accidentally create a feature that depends on some Provider that's not provided and our app blows up at runtime in a user's hands. We provide a class that exposes the developer-friendly configuration API for fake responses, and we implement the HttpClientAdapter interface provided by dio. It needed to: Include many different potential futures Include many different cash-flow patterns Respect path dependence (taxes you pay this year cant be invested next year) Accurately test how the algorithm would perform if run live. Technical interview (computer science fundamentals), Technical interview (modelling and app design), Ask the candidate to describe a recent technical challenge in detail, Introduce the pair programming problem and explore the problem, Pair programming (optional, time permitting). Not even knowing we didn't do it very bad. 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. Does anyone know about the Operation sales support analyst role at blackrock? Controllers utilizing the opt_out hook made their way onto a to-do list for this work without the stress of a deadline. 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. Server app for the TestTrack multi-platform split-testing and feature-gating system. But there was no way for us to do it all at once. Since then, the team has met several times to gather feedback and implement tweaks, but the broad strokes have remained unchanged. Process consisted of a phone screening with a recruiter, online tech assessment, and 2 video call interviews. Such linked websites are not monitored, investigated, or checked for accuracy or completeness by Betterment. Each interviewer knows which competencies (e.g., software craftsmanship) to evaluate. Striking the right balance between these priorities and thoroughly executing both is paramount to RetireGuides success, and we didnt want to miss the mark on either dimension. Well-tested code stored in version control that could easily be changed and developed. Specifically, well want to make our jobs idempotentbasically, safely retryable, or resumableand that is on us as application developers to ensure on a case-by-case basis. In our updated portfolio, the number of possible transactions types did not change. In addition, weve consistently received high marks from candidates and interviewers alike, who prefer our revamped approach. As we stated in our requirements for Coach in the first post, we believe there should be one way to test code, and one way to deploy it. It's similar to libraries for other platforms that allow you to define fake responses for HTTP requests using a nice API and then inject those fake responses into your HTTP client.