How does it work? Interviews at Betterment Experience Positive 56% Negative 28% Neutral 17% Getting an Interview Applied online 81% Recruiter 6% Employee Referral 6% Difficulty 2.9 Average Hard Average Easy Interviews for Top Jobs at Betterment Software Engineer (18) Customer Experience Associate (8) Product Designer (4) Product Manager (4) Cleaning up the most looked at metrics helped the organization speak to and understand key data in a consistent manner. Using this declarative configuration is more extensible and more user friendly and doesnt break the contract weve put in place for projects that use our CI platform. This means that we have to also inject fake implementations of any plugins we use. Finding and Preventing Rails Authorization Bugs This article walks through finding and fixing common Rails authorization bugs. We recently put some code into production that uses an optimizer to cut down on the amount of code were maintaining ourselves, and it turned out to be pretty darn cool. With our app being add-to-app and utilizing plugins, we didnt want to have to run anything native in our testing. We employed the m1.small instances, relying on the quality of quantity. A little bit of disclaimer here before we start digging in a little more: I can barely scratch the surface of how solvers work. For this example, well say were most interested in testing the profile information edit flows to start. Secured rank among top 15 in letsgrowmore summer of code, won first place in Diversion 2022, among top 3 mentors in . These tests use the same widgetTester API that regular Widget tests use but they are designed to run on a simulator, emulator, or preferably a real device. 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. If youve read this far, wed encourage you to take the leap and test out the delayed gem for yourself! And then we reached the point where manual changes were hindering our productivity. The coding question had some nice analogies back to the database Q&A and I got the impression it was a well thought-out phone screen. But the era of the spreadsheet is over. Development and testing also require us to stand up the Airflow database with predefined objects such asconnectionsandpoolsfor the code under test to function properly. The tests end up looking incredibly simple once all of these things are in place(which was the goal!) Each TradingConstraintGenerator knows about all of the system related data it needs to generate constraints. I get it, maybe you only want to hire people who know Ruby and that's fine, however you shouldn't waste other people's time. Our Slack bot could barely keep up! Theyre an alternative to the kind of high-level systems integration tests that would include a critical mass of components that would render the test slow and non-repeatable. We came up with a few rules to design this part of the system: Let the author knowas soon as possiblewhen something is red but dont overdo it for redundant failures within the same job (e.g. Google Play and the Google Play logo are trademarks of Google, Inc. Apple, the Apple logo, and iPhone are trademarks of Apple, Inc., registered in the U.S. Betterment assumes no responsibility or liability whatsoever for the content, accuracy, reliability or opinions expressed in a third-party website, to which a published article links (a linked website). Firstly, we host a private fork of delayedjobweb, a web UI that allows us to see the state of our queues in real time and drill down to specific jobs. Any insights would be helpful. Ultimately, we now know that if people are given a tool to personalize their experience within our product, folks of many different backgrounds will use it. One of the main reasons I was ecstatic to join Betterment was how I felt throughout the recruiting process. It failed for a specific GitHub branch(what-to-say-when-things-fail-branch),ina specific repo(Betterment/coach),for a specific PR(#430),for aspecific job in the test suite (coach_clilint (Gemfile)). The rebranded version of our applications core layout imported the new CSS file and just like that, we were in business. As a result, in addition to learning how well a candidate can write code, we learn how well they collaborate. Next well explore in more detail some of our design choices regarding the content of our messages and the rate at which we send them. Failure to do so could mean anything from creating a minor inconvenience to blocking trades from executing. You can read more about this approach here. Customers looking to fine-tune their desired annual savings and retirement age in real time would have to wait for our server to respond to each scenariothose added seconds become noticeable and can impair functionality. These are some of the most popular tools in each language organized by their layer in your full-stack analysis workflow: Full Stack Analysis R Python Environment RStudio iPython / Jupyter, PyCharm Sourcing Data RMySQL, rpostgresql, rvest, RCurl, httr MySQLdb,requests, bs4 Cleaning, Reshaping and Summarizing data.table, dplyr pandas Analysis, Model Building, Learning see CRAN Task Views NumPy, SciPy, Statsmodels, Scikit-learn Visualization ggplot2, ggvis, rCharts matplotlib, d3py, Bokeh Reporting RMarkdown, knitr, shiny, rpubs IPython notebook Sourcing Data If there is any ambiguity in this step, the whole analysis stack can collapse on the foundation. If we merged code into a tracked brancha branch that multiple engineers contribute to, like masterfor one of our biggest repos, which contained 20 apps and 20 test suites, we would be notified at every transition: every rubocop failure, every flakey occurrence of a feature test. Even with this plan, migrating a highly complex web application isnt easy. These were our inputs. It was just a moment in time that came and went: In the New World we wanted to proclaim loudly (or as loudly as you can proclaim in a Slack message) that the pull request was successful in CI: Tada! The end result was a lot of small files that look a little like this: https://gist.github.com/agirlnamedsophia/4b4a11acbe5a78022ecba62cb99aa85a Every time we make a change to theCoach CLIcodebase we are confident that the thousands of lines of YAML that are idempotently generated as a result of thecoach update cicommand will work as expected because theyre already tested in isolation, in unit tests. I was nervous to work in an industry I knew nothing about. Dont rewrite JavaScript. Step 1: Recruiter call and ByteBoard OA. One thing we liked about Ansible Vault is that it allows you to encrypt a whole file or just a string. Hopefully, it is possible to write unit tests for at least a part of the method's behavior. Escaping content simply means replacing special characters with entities so that HTML understands to print those characters rather than act upon their special meanings. This principle keeps us from ever having the opportunity to make some of the mistakes addressed in our next section. Its only been about three decades since companies started using any kind of computer-assisted data analysis. I interviewed at Betterment. Most of the first call went over background/experience technical interviewers pretty much only cared about the technical question asked. And these job execution guarantees arent the only area where a background queue might fail to be resilient. However, if your tests arent run in random order, you may have a false sense of confidence that the assertions youre making in them are actually accurate. How did you overcome that feeling? What does it mean to escapecontent? First was with 2 members on the team, last was with a manager. Let us know what you think! One system spec that asserts the happy path will be sufficient for most features. Weve also developed a partnership with Peoplism. Fortunately, Airflow already maintains a wide selection ofhooksto work with remote sources such as S3. 8.00% 6.000lbsofonions. And when my decision making got bogged down at the end he didn't try to hassle me with silly deadlines. We wanted that same level of flexibility in changing our mathematical model. Here's what our API looks like and how we use it to set up a fake HTTP client for our tests. Coding challenge and Sys design. This was a wonderful opportunity to practice targeted universalism: a concept that explains how building features specifically for a marginalized audience not only benefit the people in that marginalized group, but also people outside of it, which increases its broad impact. How is pay, wlb & work culture. Automatically Detecting Vulnerabilities At Betterment, we strive to make it easy for engineers to do the right thing especially when it comes to security practices. 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. As we created more applications and hired more engineers, this workflow became a bit much for our small SRE team to manage and introduced some key-person risk, also known as theBus Factor. Read more about working at Citrus Informatics. These questions open up an entirely different can of worms, one that we would prefer remained firmly sealed. AWS Regions do resilience right. We still lacked a good way to share markup across all our apps. 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. 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. Implementing a local fallback for remote hooks made our code much more testable and easier to work with locally, while still allowing us to run with Airflow-maintained functionality in production. This is a departure from Touch ID which does not require a separate privacy permission, and which uses thelocalizedReasonstring parameter when showing its evaluation prompt. Getting in the habit of asking these questions during code review should lead to more frequent conversations about security and data access. Ship It Our first run of this new process took place in November 2015. This also meant that we ended up with an API that fit our exact needs rather than having to reframe our approach to fit what nock was able to offer us. By the end of the summer, I was working on a tool to check for money launderers and fraudsters. 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 turned toAirflowbecause it has emerged as a full-featured workflow management framework better suited to orchestrate frequent tasks throughout the day. With this blank slate in front of us we were able to iterate quickly by manually adding different jobs and steps to that file. Different approaches are possible. 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. In this example, we are trying to maximize the number of pounds of ingredients he can buy because that will result in the most soup. I happened to be in the market, but I had a rush timeline as I already have few offers on the table and need to made a decision within a week. 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. safeconcathas the same functionality asrawandhtmlsafeit simply marks the content safe as is by returning it in aSafeBuffer. When do we want to give feedback? Walk me through your design process (in general and part of portfolio). The calculator focuses on just one part of the broader set of retirement calculations, and doesnt have the functionality to automatically import customers existing information. On the way into SQLite, GSON allowed us to flatten the objects, leaving only the bits that pertained to trading and discarding the rest. Commercial Customer Service Representative. We dont want to invest all of his money into a single fund. Im not talking about spoken languages. Dan Kubb has been working as a Senior Staff Software Engineer for Betterment for 393 days. If I do the same in SAS, only people willing to spend $10,000 (or more if particular modules are required) can review or extend the project. Youll notice the familiar termsmeasuring the expected value of holding each fund in each account, but also youll notice variables of the form Precisely, this variable represents the balance of fund F in account A. This is the second part of a series of posts about our new CI/CD platform,Coach. This was essentially a map for us engineers to be able to reference and go update those old usages in our codebase whenever we wanted. Additionally, we wanted an integration that we could spin-up quickly and with low ongoing cost; theres some fixed cost to getting a FFI-embed working rightbut once you do, its an exceedingly low cost integration to maintain. Over time, a handful of these teams formed deviating opinions on what kind of acceptance criteria they had for CI. Step 3: 2-hour behavioral round. We also wanted a consistent framework by which we could write these tests. This general propertythe ability to enqueue jobs safely and ensure their eventual resolutionis the core feature that we have optimized for. 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. We use containers to simulate multiple physical worker machines that connect to officially maintained local Redis and PostgreSQL containers. This makes our secrets less likely to unintentionally leak and our security team a little happier. 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? For much more on our TCP research, including additional considerations on the suitability of TCP to your circumstances, please see our white paper. the initialization happens to take a parameter whose name ends in _id but it doesnt refer to a unique identifier for any objects In both these cases, the developer should feel empowered to either rewrite the line in question or locally disable the cop, both of which will prevent the code from being flagged. At Betterment, staying compliant with regulators, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, is a part of everyday life. This rule speaks to the broader goal of authorization being obvious in our code. No trick questions. Platforms that introduce compatibility problems between versions and save their data in proprietary formats may limit access to your own work even if you are paying for the privilege. The simulated data allows us to generate novel potential outcomes, like market crashes bigger than previous ones, and generally, futures different than the past. Furthermore, because of the CPU-intensive nature behind our calculations, heavy bursts of simultaneous customers could compromise a given servers response time. Weve written a few useful helpers that allow us to easily plug in our new server-driven style into our existing Marionette application. Analysis, Model Building, Learning Youll probably only present one or two of the scores of models and variants you build and test. We might take a look at the metrics were using (the SLIs), the failures that chipped away at our target goal, and, if necessary, re-evaluate the relevancy of what were measuring. This is where SLOs come in. 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. Its a new era with a new scale of data, and its time to define new norms around management of and inferences from business data. The take home and both onsite interview questions were not arbitrary but very practical and relevant to what I'd actually be working on. iOS had a larger unit testing suite than android did, but neither had integration tests. How much money do you put in each account? You will work with an interviewer for a pair programming experience. So what does the fake look like? The process took 7 weeks. Additionally, request specs are much more realistic than controller specs since they actually exercise the full request / response lifecycle routing, middleware, etc whereas controller specs circumvent much of that process. Linear programs try to optimize the value of an objective function. To solve this programmatically, we adoptedAlembicdatabase migrations to manage these objects through code, allowing us to keep our development, testing, and production Airflow databases consistent. To keep the momentum going, we needed to transition towards a service-oriented architecture that would allow the engineers of different business units to run in parallel against their specific business goals, creating even more demand for repeatable solutions to service integration. It is your responsibility to evaluate the accuracy, reliability, timeliness and completeness of any information available on a linked website. Another option is to start tracking the level of operational complexity for their systems. We ran into quite a few issues with flutter_driver though. Has there been an increase in Customer Service requests to resolve problems related to this specific aspect of our service? Theres no context to orient us quickly to what the notification is for. By incorporating many of these practices, it is steadily becoming more and more fun to develop on the Betterment platform. We identified two viable alternatives: Build a thin web service that will accept HTTP requests, call the underlying Julia functions, and then return a HTTP response. This might seem like a show stopper, but we get around it by negating our objective function, minimizing, and then negating the results. A Redis-based queue will still introduce DB pressure if its jobs execute anything involving ActiveRecord models, and solutions must exist to throttle or rate limit these jobs. It is a historical archive and is not intended to be updated. While we encourage candidates to ask questions of everyone they meet, the AMA provides an opportunity to meet with a Betterment engineer who has zero input on whether or not to hire them. Enqueues and Transactions See, theres a major gotcha that may not be obvious from the list of ActiveJob backends. We had the pleasure of contributing a few changes to sops, and that left us feeling like we left the community a little bit better than we found it. Conclusion The path to building a highly available data processing service was not straightforward, requiring us to build a few specific but critical additions to Airflow. 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. Several times we ran into corner cases around old users, test users, and other anomalous data that caused false positive failures in our characterization tests. They were very rude. 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. Were using AmazonsDatabase Migration Service(DMS) to replace our Luigi-implemented replication solution and re-building all other Luigi workflows in Airflow. In fact, sometimes it was hard to even know where to start to make changes. Eventually, we found nock. Or perhaps we notice that what were measuring is becoming increasingly irrelevant to a customer experience, and we can get rid of the SLO entirely! Easy and comprehensive testing. I got a very upbeat and cheery sounding email to schedule the call, and my heart was pounding as I waited, and then I was met with a rejection. In addition, Rails has a few methods that provide help in escaping content. This page is operated and maintained by Betterment Holdings Inc. and it is not associated with Betterment LLC or MTG LLC. Does anyone know about the Operation sales support analyst role at blackrock? Note that the contribution limits mentioned in this example are as of the time this article was published. My experience this summer has been invaluable, and I will be returning to school with a brand new view on software development and what a career in this awesome field will be like. Opens the Fishbowl by Glassdoor site in a new window. Tell us a bit about your life before Betterment. The special sauce is that it works for more than just your tests. In addition, weve consistently received high marks from candidates and interviewers alike, who prefer our revamped approach. I work on a real-time customer data platform called the Adobe Experience Platform (AEP . . We encourage all engineers who want to add to their own CI pipeline to make changes on a branch from ourCoachrepository, where all the configuration generation magic happens, verify its effectiveness for their use-case, and open a pull request. without the complication of a service boundary). For example, a task computing all of a prior days activity executed at midnight would be inaccurate if Redshift were missing data from DMS at midnight due to lag. This was about 3 hours, 2 - 1 hour paired programming exercises with members of the team, and a 30 minute conversation/soft skills interview with the hiring manager. Redis-based queues, for example, can only be as durable (the D in ACID) as the underlying datastore, and most Redis deployments intentionally trade-off some durability for speed and availability. This means we must continuously iterate on our recruiting process to remain competitive in attracting and hiring top talent. It wasnt enough. Timeline Another change is that the entire onsite interview is completed in a single day. As a result, only 26% of 20-somethings have any money invested in stocks. I applied through a recruiter. Ill just use Betterment. With spreadsheet software in every cubicle, analytical horsepower was commoditized and Excel jockeys were crowned as the arbiters of truth in business. At Betterment, were usingJuliato power the projections and recommendations we provide to help our customers achieve their financial goals. The hiring process at Betterment takes an average of 28 days when considering 99 user submitted interviews across all job titles. If we did away with the whiteboard, then what would we use? To do good data work today, you need to use a system that is: Reproducible Its not personal, but I dont trust any number that comes without supporting code. The Problem Proportional allocation comes up often throughout our codebase, but its easiest to explain using a fictional example: Suppose your paychecks are $1000 each, and you always allocate them to your different savings accounts as follows: College savings fund: $310 Buy a car fund: $350 Buy a house fund: $200 Safety net: $140 Now suppose youre an awesome employee and received a bonus of $1234.56. 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. Graceful WorkerShutdown Upon each deploy, we useAnsibleto launch new worker instances and terminate existing workers. Ultimately, using fake plugins works well and makes this a satisfyingly functional testing solution. First, we configure out test suite to use WebValve with the RSpec config helper require 'webvalve/rspec'. 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]. In short, these bugs allow attackers to access data directly using its unique identifiers even if that data belongs to someone else because the application fails to take authorization into account. During your interview, the interviewer may use your resume and cover letter as a reference to guide questions and additional interview topics. Faking it left as much of our code as possible under test. Create 1,000 worker instances: With Amazon Cloud Service, we signed up to access time on 1,000 virtual machines. While we didnt run a scientifically valid split-test for the new process versus the old (it wouldve taken years to reach statistical significance), our hiring metrics have improved across the board. We then pivoted to investigating Flutters newer replacement for flutter_driver: integation_test. Copyright 2008-2023, Glassdoor, Inc. "Glassdoor" and logo are registered trademarks of Glassdoor, Inc. Why dont we use Feature Specs? In the case of mono-repos, if an app in that repository shouldnt have its secrets visible to all engineers who work in that repository, then the app belongs in a different repository.