We needed a workflow with less of a bottleneck, but allowing every developer access to all the secrets across the organization wasnotan acceptable answer. In order to ensure changes to our test harness didnt have far reaching effects on the underlying framework, we decided to split out the testing framework into an independent package that is completely agnostic to how our app operates. 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. So well need to consider carefully! But first, lets back up a little and answer a few basic questions. without the complication of a service boundary). I thought my 5 year was going to finally show something but it did not. In short its a sloppy feature spec. Its no longer just a script that sometimes works and sometimes doesnt. 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. After spirited internal discussions we landed on a simple principle: We should provide candidates the most natural setting possible to demonstrate their abilities. However, in keeping with the company mission to provide smarter investing, it was clear that re-engineering our code was essential to creating a better product. The Other Side of the Launch As the big day arrived, we enjoyed a smooth rebrand launch thanks to the thoughtful implementation of our existing tools and techniques. Any features youd like to see added? This solved the problem found in traditional systems where a single node acts as the gatekeeper, which can get backed up, either breaking the system or leading to idle testing time. We also split the main programming portion of our original interview into separate sections with different interviewers. 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. Because we didnt want to run the whole app with these tests in order to keep the tests lightweight enough to run on each commit, we decided to stub out a few problem areas. This forces extra thought and extra conversation in code review to ensure that the usage is in fact safe. The first round of "in person" interviews. Most of the first call went over background/experience technical interviewers pretty much only cared about the technical question asked. 16.0availableacrossallstores. 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 rule is applicable for all controller actions and is a critical component of our security story. Tests were flakey and we didnt know if it was our Jenkins setup, the tests themselves, or both. Free interview details posted anonymously by Betterment interview candidates. Any questions for me? Complete a pair programming exercise consisting of some starter code and finishing out a key function. Below is an example system spec. You want to help others whenever you can; and it has been the case that Ive received plenty of help from others who arent even directly on my team. Opens the Fishbowl by Glassdoor site in a new window. CSS (the appearance): In this example, we use it to set things like the color, alignment and the border. 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. 40.00% 4.800lbsofcarrots. 5.00% Bringing it all together Hopefully this gives you a taste of the types of problems optimizers can be used for. 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. With my start-up survival kit in tow, it was time to move on from my job as a back-office engineer. I started applying to every bootcamp scholarship I could find and received a full scholarship to Flatiron School. Ship It Our first run of this new process took place in November 2015. 2 hr ByteBoard interview - 40 min design and algorithms (know your standard data structures and algorithms), 70 mins implementing some methods Currently were focusing on building more intricate and and interactive components using React. High quality code. Getting in the habit of asking these questions during code review should lead to more frequent conversations about security and data access. We ran into quite a few issues with flutter_driver though. Total of 6 interviews (phone and in person) On Fishbowl, you can share insights and advice anonymously with Betterment employees and get real answers from people on the inside. Dont get swallowed by a faceless engineering org. We left this outside of application code so that teams can modify SLO target goals and details without having to redeploy the application itself. Download results for local analysis: From S3, we could download the summarized results of each of our simulations for analysis on a "regular" computer. Dropping observations is also one of the easiest ways for two people doing similar analyses to reach different conclusions. Betterments framework for locally developing and testing service-oriented apps in isolation with WebMock and Sinatra-based fakes. For a basic example, you generally wont need to save a record to the database to test a validation. We could not only make good decisions for Elaine, Jerry, and Newman, we could make those decisions optimally. It was clear this part of the interviewing process needed to go. Phone call + take home test prior to onsite. (Legal helpfully reviewed these principles months ago, but then I had my first child, and, as you can imagine, priorities shifted.) In short, we tested a heckuva a lot of data. Those interviewers dont fill out a scorecard, and our hiring managers are forbidden from discussing candidates with them. We went with option 2. You may be thinking, isnt this a simple math problem? Just keep an eye on it. I applied online. This makes our secrets less likely to unintentionally leak and our security team a little happier. A few days into my internship, I sat through a meeting about traditional and Roth IRAs wondering, what does IRA stand for? This is extremely convenient, to say the least, since most jobs are enqueued as part of operations that persist other changes to our database, and we can in turn rely on the all-or-nothing nature of transactions to ensure that neither the job nor the data mutation is persisted without the other. One year later, weve asked them to reflect on their experiences. For instance, is the dollar amount above the target balance in emerging markets bondsthe asset class to where VWOB belongs. 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. Lets say that his Roth IRA holds $2,750 of VTI, and $2,750 of VWOB. Separation of concerns between how we accessed data in our system and the business logic defining algorithmic behavior. I had a very pleasant experience interviewing with the team at Betterment. Glassdoor users rated their interview experience at. Take home test was easy and you were allowed to do it in a language of your choosing. 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. Free interview details posted anonymously by Betterment interview candidates. We decided to create that large file by ostensibly concatenating smaller components together. Can you speak to some techniques that have personally proven effective for you in overcoming impostor syndrome? We also made sure that when developing these cops that we tested them with real code samples and not just contrived scenarios that no developer would actually ever attempt. Similarly, weve also done this for emerging markets bonds. We also manage a separate repository for SLO definitions. Shh Its a Secret: Managing Secrets at Betterment Opinionated secrets management that helps us sleep at night. Then we do the same for the deposit API call. 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 interviewed at Betterment. Over time, a handful of these teams formed deviating opinions on what kind of acceptance criteria they had for CI. Commercial Customer Service Representative. So what do we do? At a high level, the Coach CLI generates a lot of yaml files that are used in all sorts of places to help manage operational complexity and cloud resources for consumer-facing web-apps. Editing a file is as simple as: sops deployment_secrets/sensitive/production.yml Testing We built a series of validations into sopsorific to further enforce our opinions about secrets management. Alternatively, if you want to actually pass complex objects out, youll have to ensure Julia holds a reference to the objects beyond the life of the function, in order to keep them from being garbage collected. She gave a talk on impostor syndrome, a psychological phenomenon in which people are unable to internalize their accomplishments. You can read more about this approach here. Betterment is an engineering-driven company that has developed the most trusted online financial advisor based on the principles of optimization and efficiency. What value does a Technical program manager brings to a team? Each file with detailed asset allocation, tax, trading and returns information was archived inexpensively in the cloud. A Journey to Truly Safe HTML Rendering We leverage Rubocops OutputSafety check to ensure were being diligent about safe HTML rendering, so when we found vulnerabilities, we fixed them. Then Newman. That means the next step was to build a killer testing framework. At no point did I feel the pressure thats normally associated with landing a job. One system spec that asserts the happy path will be sufficient for most features. We already do something like this for some jobs with our journaled gem, which uses AWS Kinesis to funnel event payloads out to our data warehouse (while at the same time benefiting from the same at-least-once delivery guarantees as our other jobs!). Ive inquired about pay but its gotten nowhere. 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. Sops is a great tool by itself, but operations security is hard. Our hiring managers now report that they have a much clearer understanding of what each candidate brings to the table. 2. Specifically, we wanted a tight feedback loop between the business and technology so that we could experiment and figure out what worked before committing real dollars to a solutionaka high-frequency hypothesis testing. The process took 2 weeks. Weve also developed a partnership with Peoplism. We wrote a controller-level hook to update the variant and render the new layout files, reskinning thepackage. Whose Twitter feed do you religiously follow? What did we need? When we first saw this project on the horizon, we realized it would end up requiring a substantial refactor of our web app. This meant when the designs were changed, we needed to find all of the places this code was used to update it. While the nascency of Julia as a language means that the community and ecosystem is much smaller than those of other languages, we found that the code and community oversamples on the type of libraries that we care about. alias prod-encrypt="pbpaste | ansible-vault encrypt_string --vault-password-file=~/ansible-vault/production.key" This wasnt the worst setup, but didnt scale well as we grew. At a high level, a service level objective is a way of measuring the performance of, correctness of, validity of, or efficacy of some component of a service over time by comparing the functionality of specific service level indicators (metrics of some kind) against a target goal. We came up with ACES: Automated, Consistent, Efficient, and Self-serviced as the motifs by which we could create a measurable feedback loop. We use a little command line utility to assume the role and are dropped into a secret-editor session where they use sops to add or edit secrets with their editor in the same way they add or edit code in a feature branch. Requirements for Modern Data Analysis Spreadsheets fundamentally lack these properties essential to modern data work. This question can help the interviewer determine if you have the skills necessary to succeed in this role. Popular Generators . Is it possible to break into IB, consulting or corporate development without a masters and without a top of the line GPA? Sheesh, thats a mouthful. As soon as the bug was fixed, we wanted to ensure that we had automated tests to handle a similar issue in the future. This was one reason for automating the process, but the downsides of human-managed software were another. After spirited internal discussions we landed on a simple principle: We should provide candidates the most natural setting possible to demonstrate their abilities. Tip 2: Keep all initialization & configuration code inside of setUp() methods While it may be tempting to set up certain test objects directly in your main function, this can cause sneaky issues to crop up, especially when mocking or using mutable objects. ): 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. Any of these might be the topic for a future post, and might someday make their way upstream into a public release! To make things simple, lets assume that both portfolios are only invested in two asset classes: U.S. total market stocks and emerging markets bonds. We used IronMQ to manage the queue, which allows individual worker nodes to pull inputs themselves instead of relying on a system to monitor worker nodes and push work to them. Working with our product team, we determined that the minimum amount of change to consider a page rebranded was adoption of the new header, footer, colors, and fonts. Interviewer was very friendly and was trying to know about your personality more than any work experience you may have. Straightforward tests are easy to write, read, and maintain. We talked about my career and what I was looking for. Unlike our original IRA calculator, RetireGuide needed to follow the core product principles of the Betterment experience: efficiency, real-time feedback, and delight. 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). How much money do you put in each account? To implement this pattern, we use AmazonS3as a persistent storage tier. This is because both of the cops keep a little bit of state to ensure they have the appropriate context necessary when analyzing potentially unsafe function calls. These guidelines constituted our opted out experienceviews that would receive this lightweight reskin immediately but not the full rebrand treatment. Its our job to fine-tune these to help our clients, and its very important we have these decisions be robust to the widest possible array of potential futures they might face. The remaining test harness code was put in our normal codebase where it can be iterated on freely. As we develop and experiment with new types of components, we test these bigger changes out in the real world by putting them behind a feature flag using our open source split testing framework,Test Track. Finding and Preventing Rails Authorization Bugs This article walks through finding and fixing common Rails authorization bugs. We turned toAirflowbecause it has emerged as a full-featured workflow management framework better suited to orchestrate frequent tasks throughout the day. Coding challenge and Sys design. First, the Monte Carlo The testing framework we used to assess our algorithmic strategies needed to fulfill a number of criteria to ensure we were making robust and informed decisions. 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. Actual salaries may vary depending on factors including but not limited to location, experience, and performance. We created an open-source project called Blazer to work as an extension of the Backbone router. Weve also built an equivalent library in Java, which may also see a public release at some point. Meet Blazer: A New Open-Source Project from Betterment (video) 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. I was one of those kids who broke their toys in order to find out how they worked. For more information about working at Betterment, please visit our Careers page. The simulated data allows us to generate novel potential outcomes, like market crashes bigger than previous ones, and generally, futures different than the past. The need for new elements in our views is not going to simply vanish because we rebranded, so this makes us more prepared for the future. Felt as if it was waste of my valuable time, not just with the interviews but for case study as well. The interviews varied between programming questions, system design and behavioral. Many of them took the time to draw diagrams and timelines to accompany their explanations. We stay in regular contact with stakeholders throughout a build-out and iterate over MVPs. 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. 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. This owner method for Rails apps results in all logs, error reports, and metrics being tagged with the teams name, and at deploy time it's aggregated by a Coach CLI command and turned into latency monitors with reasonable defaults for optional parameters; essentially doing the same thing as our config-driven approach but from within the code itself class DeploysController < ApplicationController owner "sre", max_response_time: "10000ms", only: [:index], slack: false end For Java apps we have a similar interface (with reasonable defaults as well) in a tidy little annotation. I was part of the Core CRM Team. IMHO, Betterment hiring process is best in the business. the trust root chain. I was nervous to work in an industry I knew nothing about. The SLO is the target percentage, 99.9%. Alongside this manual testing pain, the automated testing in the existing iOS and android codebases was inconsistent. For a problem space as large as ours, we cant fulfill that promise with a singletwo pizza team. More generally, how do we take an inflow of money and allocate it to weighted buckets in a fair, penny-precise way? It also keeps the test file clean of WidgetTester interaction, making the tests read more like a series of human actions rather than a series of code instructions. Escaping content simply means replacing special characters with entities so that HTML understands to print those characters rather than act upon their special meanings. We therefore have the added benefit of knowing that updates to CI have been tested and are deemed valid and working before theyre distributed, and we can prevent folks from removing a feature without considering the impact it may have. Below is a model spec skeleton with some common test cases: System Specs System specs are like integration tests. It was built out over the past few years, with many different paradigms and patterns. And these job execution guarantees arent the only area where a background queue might fail to be resilient. If theyre in our codebase, we should be able to iterate on the fakes without having to restart our server; the behavior isnt always right the first time, and restarting is tedious and it's not the Rails Way. Most analyses contain too many important detailed steps to plausibly communicate in an email or during a meeting. And on top of all that, is the front end code. Parting Thoughts on Our Principles Our principles arent permanent as-written. Were continually evaluating whether to adopt this process for other roles, as well. As such, information on this page may not be up to date. I started reading Robert Shillers Finance and the Good Society, a book my dad recommended to me months earlier. Points for trying though, right? Personal finance is not something many college students think aboutpartially because its not taught in school and partially because we dont have any money to worry about anyway. A 2 part Byteboard interview, a technical reasoning exercise and code implementation exercise in JavaScript. Okay, weve got an app, a test harness, and robots to interact with the screens. The minimize function takes this in as a list of tuples where the indices line up with x. Getting to work with talented, smart people who want to make a difference. A Ruby class (the behavior aside from any JavaScript): the class holds the props the component allows to be passed in as well as any methods needed for the view, similar to a presenter model. Those are stored in a file named .coach/datadog_monitors.yml and look like this: monitors: - type: metric metric: "coach.ci_notification_sent.completed.95percentile" name: "coach.ci_notification_sent.completed.95percentile SLO" aggregate: max owner: sre alert_time_aggr: on_average alert_period: last_5m alert_comparison: above alert_threshold: 5500 - type: apm name: "Pull Requests API endpoint violating SLO" resource_name: api::v1::pullrequestscontroller_show max_response_time: 900ms service_name: coach page: false slack: false It wasnt simple to make this abstraction intuitive between a Datadog monitor configuration and a user interface. If, for example, our user research says we should aim for 99.5% uptime, thats 3h 21m 36s of downtime available per 28 days. Learn with us and from us, and while youre at it, teach us what you know. Maintained and open-sourced by Mozilla, sops is a command line utility written in Go that facilitates slick encryption and decryption workflows by using your terminals default editor. Prior to Betterment, I only had experience with super small codebases that I built myself or with friends. SLOs in code Now that we have our metrics flowing, our engineers can define SLOs. 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. Our process was heavily test-driven, during which product engineering reimplemented many of the R tests in JavaScript, understood the R codes intent, and ported the code while modifying for client-side performance wins.