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. The bottlenecks in business analytics had been the speed of human arithmetic or the hours available on corporate mainframes operated by only a few specialists. Copyright 2008-2023, Glassdoor, Inc. "Glassdoor" and logo are registered trademarks of Glassdoor, Inc. At Betterment, were usingJuliato power the projections and recommendations we provide to help our customers achieve their financial goals. 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. Firstly, there wasnt a true entry point we could launch the app into because our app is add-to-app, meaning that the flutter code is embedded into our iOS and Android native applications rather than being a pure flutter app runnable from a main.dart entry point. The friendly atmosphere at Betterment and the helpfulness of the people here nurtured my nascent understanding of finance and turned me into someone who is passionate about investing. 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. Once all of these metrics make it to DataDog, were able to display a comprehensive timeboard that graphs things like average job runtime, throughput, time spent waiting in the queue, error rates, pickup query performance, and even some top 10 lists of slowest and most erroring jobs. From here, we do the things we couldnt do beforepull real parameters out of the requests and feed them back into the fake response to make it more realistic. 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. With all these decisions made, we arrived at a well-defined integration testing framework that isolated our concerns and fulfilled our testing requirements. We dont want to invest all of his money into a single fund. 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. 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! Step 3: 2-hour behavioral round. The most significant engineering challenge in building RetireGuide was turning a complex, research-driven financial model into a personalized Web application. On the way into SQLite, GSON allowed us to flatten the objects, leaving only the bits that pertained to trading and discarding the rest. Suffice it to say, crypto will not be the focus of this post. What is Secrets Management? 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]. To help us with that, we took things a step further and wrote a wrapper around sops we call sopsorific. Using our new platform to build and test code would allow our engineers to receive automated feedback sooner so they could iterate faster. In our case, via background jobs. Each machine pulls a simulation: Thanks the the maturation of modern message queues it is more advantageous and simple to orchestrate jobs in a pull-based fashion, than the old push system, as we mentioned above. But, if Elaine was set up a certain way, we wanted to go back to Jerry and adjust the decisions we made for him. Company Executive1:1 on your background and the company. Simbline. Seemed mostly focused on identifying your work style. Final round was 2, 30 minute behavioral & soft skills interviews. I was thrilled. CI is now a mechanism for instantly sharing the benefits of discovery made in isolated exploration, with everyone. Theyd attended a number of networking and connection events, and the events never felt quite right. A flash message/warning is something you may use throughout your app in different colors and with different text, but you want it to look consistent. 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. Given requirements and interface, provide an implementation More generally, Lets let be the expected value of holding fund F in account A. Circling back to the original problem, we want to rearrange the holdings in Joes accounts in a way thats maximally valuable in the future. 15.00% 6.000lbsofnoodles. Lets put it all together now into an actual test. 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. We developed the SHARE Series to create an authentic and conversational environment, one where attendees help guide the conversations and future event themes. We hired Jesse Harrelson (Betterment for Advisors Team) and Fidel Severino (Retail Team) for a 90 day Apprentice Program. I interviewed at Betterment. They also give background on the role and team structure. So even if your queue lives in an entirely separate datastore, it can be effectively coupled to your DB's IOPS and CPU limitations. Part Iexplores several design choices we made in building out our notifications pipeline and describes how those choices are emblematic of our overarching engineering principles here at Betterment. De-scoping with a Lightweight Reskin To rebrand hundreds of pages in time, we had to iron out the precise requirements of what it meant for our views to be on brand. We were deeply attracted to the idea of being able to fully integration-test our projections and recommendations working within our actual app (i.e. Because integration tests are more expensive to write and maintain than screen tests, we wanted to make sure the flows we were testing were the most impactful. That usually means that they end up being pretty slow and they tend to be somewhat flaky. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ 1 file inspected, 1 offense detected The model initialization was flagged because it was seen using create_params, which contains user input. By knowing that the Coach app is aruby_appwe know how many jobs will need to be run and when. Betterment has also established a "debt day" where once every month or two, all developers take one day to pay down technical debt, including legacy code. This dedicated MySQL instance consisted of three database schemas we now refer to as our Triumvirate Data Warehouse. There is a focus on asserting that the end user sees what we expect them to see. Everyone's going mobile! The phenomenon, Williams said, is something that she has seen particularly among high-achieving womenwhere self-doubt becomes an obstacle for professional development. Enter the SHARE (Support, Hire, Aspire, Relate, Empower) Series. without the complication of a service boundary). The big idea: By building empathy and connection among ourselves, we can create an inclusive environment that cultivates innovative ideas and a better product for our customers. The input data was serialized and automatically fed back into our test fixtures. Weve also covered how our custom cops can help developers avoid antipatterns, resulting in safer and easier to read code. 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. We decided to allow candidates the choice of using a whiteboard if they wished, but it would no longer be the default method for presenting ones skills. Part of that commitment includes reflecting the diversity of those customers. 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. One system spec that asserts the happy path will be sufficient for most features. Given these reasons, Julia is the perfect language to serve as a solution to the two-language problem. On a related note, the entire company has a collaborative culture that is contagious. We built a tool (Coach) to make the way that we build and test code conventional across all of our of apps, regardless of language, application owner, or business unit. This meant when the designs were changed, we needed to find all of the places this code was used to update it. We recently adopted Amazons DMS for continuous cross-database replication to Redshift, moving away from our internally-built solution. A software engineer needs to be multilingual. If we did away with the whiteboard, then what would we use? In order to do this, we built out a fake http client that allows us to configure network responses for given requests. While new products can often be achieved using our existing engineering abstractions, TCP brought the engineering team a new level of complexity that required us to rethink how parts of our portfolio management system were built. Theres actually a critical security bug here that allows the client to specify any attachment_id, even if they dont own that attachment - eek! While we could achieve high availability with Luigi, its now 2017 and the data engineering landscape has shifted. Try it out! High quality code. It needed to be able to organize the different server endpoints (and its data) into models, as well as know how to take those models and render them into views. When he signed up for Betterment, he opened a Roth IRA account. After flipping the feature flag and establishing rebrand as the permanent variant context, all that remained was to destroy the legacy files that were no longer being rendered and remove the variant name from the file extension of the new primary view template. 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. 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. What would you say has been the most rewarding part of your experience so far? While migrating from Luigi to Airflow is not yet complete, Airflow has already offered us a solid foundation. Not only does this increase test readability (each set up method will set up only the dependencies needed for the tests below it and within the same scope in the testing tree), but this reduces the scope for potential problems. Consider the following controller: So long as a user is authenticated, they can perform the show action on any document (including documents belonging to others!) It should just work unless there are secrets that have different values than already configured in the default file. My interactions with technology prior to learning about programming had always been as a consumer. Also, the flutter_driver API worked differently than the screen testing API and was generally more difficult to use. Okay brass tacks. If you had prior experience with these languages the problems are easy to solve. A note on behavior: Currently, if we need to add some JS behavior, we use unobtrusive JavaScript or UJS sprinkles. 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. We then turned to the challenge of rebranding our entire user experience. It is notoriously hard to estimate the complexity of a task when it needs to be built into or on top of a legacy system. Our principles are a living document in an actual git repository that well continue to add to and revise as we learn and grow. This meant there was minimal test environment setup. While most of this transition was smooth, there were a few cases where legacy code slowed our progress. Our hiring managers now report that they have a much clearer understanding of what each candidate brings to the table. Our team learned a lot, but a few key takeaways come to mind. Its all grounded in developing the best solutions for our customers and helping them achieve financial wellness. 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. Too often, the events involved forced networking and stodgy PowerPoint presentations, with takeaways amounting to little more than a free glass of wine. 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. It is bootstrapped (sampled in chunks) to help generate potential futures. As an example, consider the following simple Julia function which sorts an array of numbers using theinsertion sortalgorithm: In order to be able to expose this in a shared library, we would wrap it like this: Here weve simplified memory management by requiring the caller to allocate memory for the result, and implemented primitive exception handling (seeChallenges & Pitfallsbelow). Standardize and educate A major part of our data warehouse build out was in clarifying definitions of business terms and key metrics present in our daily parlance. 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. Copyright 2008-2023, Glassdoor, Inc. "Glassdoor" and logo are registered trademarks of Glassdoor, Inc. In order to effectively work on multiple pieces of an app, an engineer needs to be fluent in multiple different languages. Each ecosystem defines a comprehensive set of secretsThe 12-factor app methodology reminds us that all environments should resemble production as closely as possible. 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. Both libraries are great and each is designed for a specific challenge, check both of them out and decide which one works for your needs. 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. 3 step process for me: To find a solution, we drew inspiration fromthe component approachused by modern design systems and JavaScript frameworks. Okay, weve got an app, a test harness, and robots to interact with the screens. Additionally, we can use things like ActiveRecord to make these fake responses even more realistic based on the data stored in our actual database. We are built from the ground up on a foundation of data. Now, I know that my money (well, the money I will hopefully have in the future) ideally should work hard for me instead of just sitting in a savings account. I couldnt tell you what a dividend was. How did we doit? Betterments promise to customers rests on our ability to execute. I applied online. At Betterment, were working on our own set of initiatives to drive the conversation. This light coat of paint was applied to our production layer, so any experience that couldnt be fully redesigned within our timeline would still get a fresh header and the fonts and colors that reflected our new brand. Or they can define some SLOs around types of on-call tasks that their team tackles each week. Since the first test will always run before the second test, were not privy to this dependency. Fidel Severino: The opportunity to join Betterments Apprenticeship program came via the Flatiron School. Women Who Code: An Engineering Q&A with Venmo Betterment recently hosted a Women in Tech meetup with Venmo developer Cassidy Williams, who spoke about impostor syndrome. Heres how we did it. Engineering at Betterment: Do You Have to Be a Financial Expert? These questions open up an entirely different can of worms, one that we would prefer remained firmly sealed. Over time, a handful of these teams formed deviating opinions on what kind of acceptance criteria they had for CI. 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. Discussion Finally, weve added an Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) sessionanother idea provided by our Women in Technology group. As of July 2016, all full-stack, mobile, and site-reliability engineering roles have adopted this new approach. 2.5 hr final onsite - behavioral (I did not make it here, but recruiter told me schedule beforehand), Anonymous Interview Candidate in New York, NY, I applied online. Using Targeted Universalism To Build Inclusive Features The best products are inclusive at every stage of the design and engineering process. Parting Thoughts on Our Principles Our principles arent permanent as-written. These are not leetcode problems, these are asking you to implement functionality using ruby on rails. To implement this pattern, we use AmazonS3as a persistent storage tier. Pretty Easy. We also streamlined our question-asking process and hiring timeline, and added an opportunity for candidates to speak with non-interviewers. Currently were focusing on building more intricate and and interactive components using React. Failure to do so could mean anything from creating a minor inconvenience to blocking trades from executing. Explore our engineering community and nerd out with us on all things tech. The only downside of DMS is that we are not aware of how recent source data is in Redshift. For example, customers could set up a Roth IRA with a portfolio of 90% stocks and 10% bonds to save for retirement. Isnt resilience a basic feature of every backend, except maybe the test/development ones? 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. In Flutter, the way to write end-to-end tests is with flutter_driver and the integration_test package. It also really felt like the company was working in good faith the entire process and I definitely took notice. 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. If youre not seeing numbers you expect, or it is taking a long time to come up with a solution, the initial guess is often the first place to start. Did we notice a number of false positives? We use Coach CLI driven yaml files to support metric or APM monitor types directly in the code base. Menu . Rolling your own cryptoisnt a great idea. Everyone from Betterment is proud of the company and work they have done there, which made my decision not join really difficult. Additionally, we have regulatory obligations to report complex data to third parties daily, making data engineering a mission critical part of what we do at Betterment. My assignment was to give everyone in the office a visual snapshot of how the company is doing. Jennifer Arguello - I met Jennifer at the White House Tech Inclusion Summit back in 2013, where we hit it off talking about diversity in tech and her time with the Latino Startup Alliance. Weve pushed the aforementioned nuisance and complexity into our data pipeline (ETL) process and are able to synthesize atomic and summary metrics in a format that is more intuitive for our business users. Each would ask same question , only rephrased. Not to mention almost everything else I needed I was able to learn through Google, which makes me wonder if I could have learned Java through the Internet in a few weeks rather than spending the past two years in school?
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