Today: A Better Interview Heres our revised interview process: Resum review Initial phone screen Technical phone screen Onsite: Technical interview 1 Ask the candidate to describe a recent technical challenge in detail Set up the candidates laptop Introduce the pair programming problem and explore the problem Pair programming (optional, time permitting) Technical interview 2 Pair programming Technical interview 3 Pair programming Ask-Me-Anything session Product and design interview Hiring manager interview Company executive interview While an interview setting may not offer pair programming in its purest sense, our interviewers truly participate in the process of writing software with the candidates. At Betterment, staying compliant with regulators, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission, is a part of everyday life. Jenkins is a powerful tool and well-used in the industry, but we decided to cut it because the way that we were using it was wrong, we werent pleased with its feature set, and there was too much technical debt to overcome. ): 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. From an engineering standpoint, this question revealed a few hurdles that we needed to clear up. Weve been using these cops for over a year now and have had a lot of success with them. I applied online. If we dont escape content properly, we could open ourselves and our customers up to security risks. So the string option was appealing to us, but that workflow didnt have the best editing experience as it required multiple steps in order to encrypt a value, insert it into the correct file, and then export it into the environment like the12-factor appmethodology tells us we should. From a design standpoint, executing a preferred name feature was pretty straightforwardwe needed to provide a user with a way to share their preferred name with us, and then start using it. onsite-to-offer rate (industry . Secured rank among top 15 in letsgrowmore summer of code, won first place in Diversion 2022, among top 3 mentors in . In sops, weve found a tool that combines all of these things enabling a workflow that makes secrets management easier. We wrote tests around the methods in question. This forces extra thought and extra conversation in code review to ensure that the usage is in fact safe. All the info I provided is given to you at the time of the interview. The key functionality (Ahem! Now, updating CI requires opening a PR to make the change. We made a good effort to understand it. I couldnt tell you what a dividend was. Our principles are a living document in an actual git repository that well continue to add to and revise as we learn and grow. Well fake the integration by using Sinatra to build a rack app that quacks like the real thing. We use these cops in conjunction with the default RuboCop configurations for all of our Ruby projects. Tooling To simplify development, we use a lot of tooling and infrastructure developed both in-house and by the Julia community. This is why we adoptedDockerto run a production-like Airflow cluster from the ground up on our development machines. Heres simple way to resolve our bug: Now before we create a new AttachmentLink, we verify that the attachment_id specified actually belongs to the user and our code will raise a 404 otherwise - perfect! Company Executive1:1 on your background and the company. Back in the Day Heres how our interview process once looked: Resum review Initial phone screen Technical phone screen Onsite: Day 1 Technical interview (computer science fundamentals) Technical interview (modelling and app design) Hiring manager interview Onsite: Day 2 Product and design interview Company founder interview Company executive interview While this process helped in growing our engineering team, it began showing some cracks along the way. The collaborative environment. We did it! Secret-editor roles are named after their corresponding IAM role which includes the security zone and the name of the GitHub repository. 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. Those come to life in four major principles, which guide how we engage with the problem space for our shift to a service-oriented architecture: We use HTTP & REST to communicate with collaborator services We define the boundaries and limit the testing of integrations with contract tests We don't share code across service boundaries Engineers must remain nimble and building features must remain enjoyable. In the case of services not performing well over time, the conversation might be focus on improving reliability for service XYZ. But what happens if our users are super happy, our SLOs are exceptionally well-defined and well-achieved, and were ahead of our roadmap? To facilitate versioning and sharing of our Julia packages internally (e.g. As a Rails shop, we already make heavy use of RuboCop. In other words, the following test file will always exit successfully, despite the fact that there are obvious issues with how its set up. This page is operated and maintained by Betterment Holdings Inc. and it is not associated with Betterment LLC or MTG LLC. Betterment Lead Software Engineer Interview Questions 3. This post is part of series of articles written by Betterments 2013 summer interns. Once we migrate to Rails 5, we should even be able to easily take advantage of Turbolinks 3, which is a conventionalized way to do regional AJAX updates. However, with so many sources of input affecting the optimized result, writing tests to cover these cases was very labor-intensive. We love the idea of these tests, the level of confidence they'd give us that our app works as intended, and how they'd eliminate manual QA testing, but we loathe the cost of running them, both in terms of time and actual $$$ of CI execution. 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. Collecting the SLIs and Creating the SLOs The SRE team has a web-app and CLI called coach that we use to manage continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD), among other things. How We Engineered Betterments Tax-Coordinated Portfolio For our latest tax-efficiency feature, Tax Coordination, Betterments solver-based portfolio management system enabled us to manage and test our most complex algorithms. Today, on its first day, were thrilled to announce that the Betterment iOS app fully supports Apples new Face ID technology on the iPhone X. Trusting the SecureEnclave While were certainly proud of shipping this feature quickly, a lot of credit is due to Apple for how seriously the company takes device security and data privacy as a whole. An easy trap to fall into as an object-oriented developer is to get too caught up in the idea that everything has to be an object. 2 hr ByteBoard interview - 40 min design and algorithms (know your standard data structures and algorithms), 70 mins implementing some methods 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. First was with 2 members on the team, last was with a manager. Dont get swallowed by a faceless engineering org. 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. Thats a lot of time we can reasonably not react to failures. Deadnaming is when, intentionally or not, you refer to a trans person by the name they used before transitioning. Open Many analyses meet the above ideals but have been produced with expensive, proprietary statistical software that inhibits sharing and reproducibility. To make this fake work, all we have to do is define the conventionally-named environment variable, TRADINGAPIURL. Not only was this frustrating, but it was inefficient. More broadly, a 2015 survey of large businesses in the UK reported that 17% had experienced direct financial losses because of spreadsheet errors. I applied online. Here's a peek inside of the Charlatan API. Photo credit: Christine Meintjes Abi: Can you speak about a time in your life where impostor syndrome was limiting in your own career? Suraj Prasad. According to Healthline, because legal name changes are expensive, inaccessible, and not completely effective at eliminating deadnaming, institutions like Betterment can and should make changes to support our trans customers. Option 1: Continue Running R Directly Our first plan was to reuse the research code in R and let it continue to run server-side, building an API on top of the core functions. Use your answer to highlight some of the most important skills for a junior software engineer, along with examples of how you've used those skills in the past. At no point did I feel the pressure thats normally associated with landing a job. polling a database) can run on higher concurrency per CPU core to save overall resources. System specs were added to Rails 5.1 core and it is the core teams preferred way to test client-side interactions. Being able to integrate (ba dum tss) these new tests into our existing test suite is excellent because it meant that we would get quick feedback when code breaks while developing. Joe isnt one to take huge risks, so he opted for a moderate asset allocation of 50% stocks and 50% bonds in both his Roth IRA and taxable accounts. 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. We did the same for outputs, which were also full of noise for our purposes. Then Newman. I was also invited back the following week to speak with another product person and the CTO. With hundreds of constraints and hundreds of thousands of unique tax profiles across our customer base, we needed to be confident that our system made the right decisions in the right situations. Given requirements, explain how one may model some data. But the point is that jobs are never simply dropped, or silently deleted, or lost to the cyber-aether, at any point, from the moment we enqueue them to their eventual resolution. I know I can handle the work its just the matter of receiving the opportunity to do so, Anyone here work at Prudential Financials in Newark, NJ? I was also applying for another different apprenticeship program but throughout the transparent, straightforward interview process, the Betterment apprenticeship quickly became my first choice. My first task involved DTC participants, CUSIPs, and ACATSall terms that Id never heard before. 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. 30 min Q & A with head of recruiting - you ask questions, recruiter asks questions safeconcathas the same functionality asrawandhtmlsafeit simply marks the content safe as is by returning it in aSafeBuffer. Our allocation code doesnt need to care that were looking to allocate money, just that were looking to allocate integers. This was one reason for automating the process, but the downsides of human-managed software were another. The integer quotients with their respective remainders are [38271, 36000], [43209, 60000], [24691, 20000], [17283, 84000]. Relieving Launch Day Stress with Feature Flags Embarking on this rebrand project, we wanted to keep our designs under wrap until launch day. Inform the roadmap Within three weeks of operations, it became clear that we could use turn-around time metrics from ad-hoc or advisory requests to inform us where we need to invest in project cycles and technology. 4. 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. Betterment Junior Software Engineer Interview Questions Friction here refers to ambiguity of CI results and the uncertainty of knowing where your code is in the CI/CD process. As a result, only 26% of 20-somethings have any money invested in stocks. Start with the test Heres a look at what a test would look like to see if a deposit from a bank was initiated: The five lines of code on the bottom is the meat of the test. One year later, weve asked them to reflect on their experiences. Where a widget test will run in a fraction of a second to a second, one of these integration tests will take many seconds. 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. The interview was centered around how well you communicate,work with others, and problem solve. Handle a few basic cases and be done with them. In 2012, I graduated from the University of Portland with a degree in computer science and promptly moved to the Bay Area. First things firstdefining our view of the problem space. Such linked websites are not monitored, investigated, or checked for accuracy or completeness by Betterment. The right hand side of the equation is assumed to be zero. This is where SLOs come in. Since then, the team has met several times to gather feedback and implement tweaks, but the broad strokes have remained unchanged. To get there we had to make all of our Java apps respond to the same set of commands, and all of our Ruby apps to do the same. Last fall, Betterment optimized its portfolio, moving from the original platform to an upgraded trading platform that included more asset classes and the ability to weight exposure of each asset class differently for every level of risk. You are viewing a web property located at Betterment.com. Ive always had a curious mind. For Betterment, this means working to build a company of passionate individuals who reflect our customers and bring new and different perspectives to our work. These tests are pretty easy to write (just as easy as regular widget tests) but hard-ish to debug and very slow to run. Free interview details posted anonymously by Betterment interview candidates. We began with thispull requestto patch the first issuechange the behavior of the cop to recognizerawandhtmlsafeas violations regardless of being wrapped insafejoin. The investment analytics team combined their R functions using Shiny, a tool for building user interfaces in R, and released Betterments IRA calculator as a precursor to RetireGuide. Make sure our engineers dont mute their slack notifications In leaving the Old World of inconsistent and contextually sparse communication we looked at our blank canvas and initially thought every time the tests pass, send a notification! Tell me about yourself Describe a process you fixed. As such, our technical interviews switched from whiteboards to computers. This article is part ofEngineering at Betterment. Historically, the team has written code mostly in a research environment, implementing proof-of-concept models that are later translated into production code with help from the engineering team. But in the Old World there wasnt enough context to make the message immediately useful. 93 software engineer interview questions from top tech companies These are not leetcode problems, these are asking you to implement functionality using ruby on rails. Whether its a database query, a Web-scraping function, a MapReduce job, or a PDF extraction, script it and include it in your reproducible process. Finally, we sort our buckets in descending remainder order (because the buckets with the highest remainders are most deserving of extra pennies) and allocate the leftover pennies we have in this order. For example, by assuming that any Java library will run thePMDlinter and unit tests in a certain way we can bootstrap a new repository with very little effort.
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