30 min recruiter screen - talk about your experience and why you are a good fit Using a separate CSS manifest with the core changes enumerated above, we felt free to dedicate resources to more thoroughly rebranding our high traffic experiences, deferring improvements to pages that received the initial reskin until after launch. Alternatively, stick to only interviewing candidates who know Ruby. Memory managementif youll be passing anything other than primitive types back from Julia to Ruby (e.g. Our team learned a lot, but a few key takeaways come to mind. Total of 6 interviews (phone and in person) Before we built TCP, Betterment customers had each account managed as a separate, standalone portfolio. The cost of maintaining a separate codebase is well worth the benefits to our customers and our code quality. free the memory) when its done with it (Ruby-FFI has good support for triggering a callback when an object goes out-of-scope on the Ruby side). For us, speed is important as we need to be able to provide real-time advice to our customers by incorporating their most up-to-date financial scenario in our projections and recommendations. Questions were in JavaScript, ruby on rails, and React having to implement specific features into a pre developed app. The problem with this is that whenraworhtmlsafeare used to mark content as already safe by putting it in aSafeBufferas is,safejoinwill not actually do anything additional to escape the content. NDA signed. Exception handlingconveying unhandled exceptions across the FFI boundary is generally not possible. 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. 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. While we want to iterate rapidly, we strive to never compromise the security of our customers nor the correctness of our code. We also maintain two other dashboards in our cloud monitoring service, DataDog. 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. Does not reflect any actual portfolio and is not a guarantee of performance. We believe in a world where shipping code, even in really large codebases with lots of contributors, should be done dozens of times a day. This is just one more example of where our quest for efficiencyand your happinesspaid off. Kelly Hoey - I met Kelly at a women in tech hackathon during my last summer as a student in 2013, and then she ended up being on my team on the British Airways UnGrounded Thinking hackathon. To meet these needs, we created Blazer, an extension of the Backbone router. 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. From the left: Avi Lederman, data warehousing engineer; Yuriy Goldman, engineering lead; Jon Mauney, data analyst; Nick Petri, data analyst; and Andrew Weisgall, marketing analyst. The takeaway The biggest lesson to learn from this experience is that, as an engineer, you should not be afraid to take a functional approach when it makes sense. They accomplished that by hiding the users legal name in a dropdown accordion that is toggled closed by default. The CLI handles notifications, artifact generation, and deployment triggers. Relevant ecosystem. While we tried to construct computer science and data modelling problems that led to informative interviews, watching candidates solve these problems still wasnt getting to the heart of whether theyd be successful engineers once at Betterment. Similarly, were also asserting that the sum of the balances of VWOB across Joes accounts must be equal to the remaining half of his total balance. Additionally, in CircleCI where we can easily parallelize our test suites, we realized we wouldnt want to notify someone for every chunk of the test suite that failed, just the first time a failure happened for the suite. All return examples and return figures mentioned above are for illustrative purposes only. Here was a company that wasnt solely focused on the traditional Computer Science education when hiring an apprentice/junior engineer. 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. Variable server response times do not provide an optimal user experience, especially when performing personalized financial projections. I didnt know 401(k)s were employer-sponsored. R and Python both have great tools to produce finished reports as static HTML or PDF documents, or even interactive reporting and visualization products. For example, customers could set up a Roth IRA with a portfolio of 90% stocks and 10% bonds to save for retirement. As a computer science major, school has taught me how to code in Java, and maybe some of the theoretical stuff that Ive had drilled into my head will come in handy at some point in my life. Each TradingConstraintGenerator knows about all of the system related data it needs to generate constraints. I interviewed at Betterment in Feb 2022. In Rails 5+, integration tests have been made to run very fast. Interviews are now more prescriptive regarding non-technical questions. You are viewing a web property located at Betterment.com. Getting to work with talented, smart people who want to make a difference. We want them to be able to work without an internet connection, and if we do want to integrate with a real service in local development, we should be able to do thatmeaning we should be able to test and integrate locally at will, without having to rely on cumbersome, extra-connected services (think Docker, Kubernetes; anything that pairs cloud features with the local environment.) While we love the simplicity and flexibility of Backbone, weve recently encountered situations where the Backbone router didnt perfectly fit the needs of our increasingly sophisticated application. They showed me how we were getting quite a few requests from trans customers to quit deadnaming them. We cant split a penny into fractions, so we cant give your college savings fund the exact proportional amount. At Betterment, our ultimate goal is to continue developing products that change the investing worldand that starts with data. Using our new platform to build and test code would allow our engineers to receive automated feedback sooner so they could iterate faster. This leaves our app looking something like this: Given that this is approximately what the app looks like, the test harness needs to grant control of the HttpClient and the ImageCropperService. What is an SLO? Graceful WorkerShutdown Upon each deploy, we useAnsibleto launch new worker instances and terminate existing workers. These were our outputs. Takeaways Though our venture into the Julia world is still relatively young compared to most of the other code at Betterment, we have found Julia to be a perfect fit in solving our two-language problem within the Investing team. To meet these needs, we created Blazer, an extension of the Backbone router. With our new Tax Coordination feature, were continuing the mission to help our customers portfolios become as tax efficient as possible. Well dive more into system spec best practices in a future blog post. This test would go on to have a few more steps detailing the interactions on the subsequent screens. At a high level, these cops track user input (via params.permit et al.) This post was written with Dan Egan. 6 more interviews with other potential team members. Consider these principles, along with our current and future open source work, part of our contribution to that conversation. 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. Abletocarry15.0pounds. How did we doit? 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. 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. We employed the m1.small instances, relying on the quality of quantity. We decided to start fresh withCircleCI, an alternative to Jenkins that comes with a lot more opinions, far fewer rough edges, and a lot more stability built-in. Well, it was one part versatility of software engineering, one part courage to work in an industry I knew nothing about, and a dash of eagerness to learn as much as I could. chicken:5.000lbs(5.0instock) carrots:0.000lbs(1.0instock) thyme:0.000lbs(3.0instock) onions:0.699lbs(6.0instock) noodles:1.000lbs(5.0instock) garlic:1.565lbs(2.0instock) parsley:1.565lbs(3.0instock) 7.582lbsoffoodfromGeorge's. When writing code, we try to keep in mind that we probably won't come back later and clean up the code, and that we never know who the next person to touch this code will be. We talked about my career and what I was looking for. In 2012, I graduated from the University of Portland with a degree in computer science and promptly moved to the Bay Area. Betterment engineers (l-r): Arielle Sullivan, J.P. Patrizio, Harris Effron, and Paddy Estridge We recently changed the way we organize our major business objects. Sopsorific uses the term ecosystem to describe this concept, as well as collectively describe a suite of apps that make up a working Betterment system. We still have our route, controller, and model, but instead of a jbuilder for returning JSON, we can port our template to embedded Ruby, and let the server do all the work. This means we must continuously iterate on our recruiting process to remain competitive in attracting and hiring top talent. I couldnt tell you what a dividend was. A little bit of disclaimer here before we start digging in a little more: I can barely scratch the surface of how solvers work. That will reduce friction! So we tried that. Development Engineers have permissions to assume the secret-editor role for the security zones they have access to. 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. 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. Cassidy Williams, a software engineer at mobile payments company Venmo, recently came in to speak. It couldnt scale out to the rest of the org with ease. We wanted to have a test harness that we could use to set up the app under test and the world that the app would run in, however we knew this configuration code would be mildly complicated and something that would be in flux. If content is inside aSafeBuffer, Rails wont try to escape it upon rendering. Candidates applying for Software Engineer had the quickest hiring process (on average 22 days), whereas Product Designer roles had the slowest hiring process (on average 39 days). In short its a sloppy feature spec. Whats missing? So lets take our feature spec. In addition to problems arising from the types of questions asked, we saw that one of our primary interview tools, the whiteboard, was actually getting in the way; many candidates struggled to communicate their solutions using a whiteboard in an interview setting. 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. A component is a reusable code building block. I went above and beyond for years doing extra work, organizations etc and nothing has been reflected in pay. Soon enough, I had not only expanded my knowledge of engineering best practices, but I learned about dividends, tax loss harvesting, and IRAs (it stands for individual retirement account, in case you were wondering). While this will certainly work for this particular example, enforcing that the portfolio allocation is exactly on target when determining optimality turns out to be too restrictive. We Scrum, we Git, and we Jenkins. SLOs should align with business objectives and needs, which will help Product and Engineering Managers understand the direct business impact of engineering efforts. From an engineering standpoint, this question revealed a few hurdles that we needed to clear up. Worse yet, its impossible to remember exactly what youve done in a point and click environment, so doing it the same way again next time is a crap shoot. This means that an engineer implementing a change to the model would only need to worry about implementing algorithmic behavior, and not about how to retrieve the data needed to do that. Build extra time into project estimates Legacy code can also be tricky when it comes to project estimates. At Betterment, we definitely prefer to be closer to the 100% coverage end of the spectrum, but we know that in practice that's not really a feasible end state if we want to ship changes quickly and deliver rapid feedback to our engineers about their proposed changes. Technical problems really felt more like they were grounded more in learning your thought process and general development style. Ultimately, using fake plugins works well and makes this a satisfyingly functional testing solution. This was one reason for automating the process, but the downsides of human-managed software were another. There are also feasibility limits. Give a solid implementation of your solution rather than focusing on the testing/description. To assist us in expediting this workflow, we had an alias in our bash_profiles that allowed us to run a shortcut at the command line to encrypt the secret value from our clipboard and then insert that secret value in the appropriate Ansible variables file for the appropriate environment. This would be accomplished through the use of dashboards displayed on TV screens inside the office. Why Julia? My responsibilities are to develop new functionalities, bug fixing, maintaining and deploying production and staging applications. The APM monitor type was simple enough to turn into both a Java annotation and a tiny domain specific language (DSL) for Rails controllers, giving us nice symmetry across our platforms. Try it out! 3. The take home and both onsite interview questions were not arbitrary but very practical and relevant to what I'd actually be working on. See full disclosure for our estimates and Tax Coordination in general. This Is How You Bootstrap a Data Team Data alone is not enoughwe needed the right storytellers. The process took 3 weeks. Then, we configure our init system, upstart, to execute the process wrapped in the sopsorific run command. Tooling and libraries for processing dart test output into dev-friendly formats. While most of this transition was smooth, there were a few cases where legacy code slowed our progress. With the interviews in hand, the team sat down to pen a manifest and define pillars by which we would measure our progress. All interviewers were very nice and easy to talk to, one of the better interview experiences while searching for an entry level role. Request Specs Request specs test the traditional responsibilities of the controller. We originally ran our data platform on a single machine in 2015 when we ingested far less data with fewer consumer-facing requirements. Got the first interview in about 3 weeks. Using UJS patterns, our view can live completely on the server. Sheesh, thats a mouthful. It doesnt take a very large business these days to collect more than 1 million observations of customer interactions or transactions. Since then, the team has met several times to gather feedback and implement tweaks, but the broad strokes have remained unchanged. However, to complete this integration, we needed to migrate the entire advice tool from our R codebase into the Betterment Web application ecosystem. The technical interviews stood out from other on-site experiences because the problems felt "real world" - they were based on actual challenges Betterment's team has had to solve. Normally wed consider opting out of security analysis to be an unsafe thing to do, but we actually like the way RuboCop handles this because it can help reduce some code review effort; the first solution eliminates the vulnerable-looking pattern (even if it wasnt a vulnerability to begin with) while the second one signals to reviewers that they should confirm this code is actually safe (making it easy to pinpoint areas of focus). Ans: Civil engineering has always been an exciting field for me, as it involves designing and building infrastructure that people use on a daily basis. The process took 2 months. How did you overcome that feeling? 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. Relieving Launch Day Stress with Feature Flags Embarking on this rebrand project, we wanted to keep our designs under wrap until launch day. The interview process was smooth and prompt. 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. My interactions with technology prior to learning about programming had always been as a consumer. Dont get swallowed by a faceless engineering org. Its all grounded in developing the best solutions for our customers and helping them achieve financial wellness. Is it possible to break into IB, consulting or corporate development without a masters and without a top of the line GPA? chicken:3.000lbs(3.0instock) carrots:0.632lbs(2.0instock) thyme:0.000lbs(6.0instock) onions:0.000lbs(4.0instock) noodles:5.000lbs(9.0instock) garlic:0.000lbs(0.0instock) parsley:0.000lbs(1.0instock) 16.000lbsofchicken. How did I go from creating avatars with Pikachu ears to improving detection of financial criminals? Definitely not my cup of tea. You may have noticed that unlike the previous example, the vulnerable code doesnt directly reference a params.permit call or any of the parameter names, but the code was still flagged. Testing When writing request specs for a controller action, write a negative test case to prove that attempts to circumvent your authorization measures return a 404. Jesse Harrelson, a Betterment Software Engineer, not only leads our hosting events, they found a path to Betterment through Women Who Code. Engineering at Betterment: Do You Have to Be a Financial Expert? After spirited internal discussions we landed on a simple principle: We should provide candidates the most natural setting possible to demonstrate their abilities. Uncertainty like this makes it hard to build new and awesome features into a product. We think engineers should focus on what they care about the most, shipping great features quickly and reliably. Lets say weve defined some SLOs and notice they are falling behind over time. Dealing With the Uncertainty of Legacy Code To complete our portfolio optimization, we had to tackle a lot of legacy code. Today Id like to talk about how we increased consistent adoption of Continuous Integration (CI) across our engineering organization, and why. Furthermore, this combination of at-least-once execution and idempotency can then be used in a distributed systems context, to ensure the eventual consistency of changes across multiple apps and databases. This article is part ofEngineering at Betterment. Learn more about engineering jobs and our culture. Theres so many things I would love to list here. The second member is client_analytics. Let's imagine a simple social network app, igrastam, that has an activity feed screen, a profile screen, a flow for updating your profile information, and a flow for posting images. The last important hurdle is native plugins. Lets add them to our objective function: is the dollar amount above the target balance in asset class AC. Our team is passionate about our mission: making people's lives better. 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. On average, Dan Kubb works for one company for 5 years 1 month. In addition to Coach explicitly providing a config-driven interface for monitors, weve also written a couple handy runtime specific methods that result in automatic instrumentation for Rails or Java endpoints. For this reason, we have a robust testing infrastructure and only peer-reviewed, thoroughly-tested code gets pushed through to production. Also note, do not get your hopes up if you get a personal call from your recruiter after the final interview. Weve been using these cops for over a year now and have had a lot of success with them. We needed a solution that not only maintained our security posture throughout the software development lifecycle, but also enforced our opinions about how secrets should be managed across environments. In this model there is no single controller. This principle keeps us from ever having the opportunity to make some of the mistakes addressed in our next section. We no longer write controller specs. INSTEAD OF THIS: Post.find(params[:post_id]) DO THIS: currentuser.posts.find(params[:postid]) See here for more information on this error: https://github.com/Betterment/betterlint/blob/main/README.md#bettermentunscopedfind @document = Document.find(params[:document_id]) ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ 1 file inspected, 1 offense detected The cop successfully located the vulnerability. What do you think are the biggest trends of our time in this space?
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