This process added extra validation, testing, and optimizations, helping us to create the most accurate advice in our end product. Finally, to bolt this on to an IRL application, we need the ability to define fakes incrementally and migrate them into existing integrations that we have, one by one. Instead, we automated the test setup by building tools that could snapshot our input data as of the time the error occurred. All teams at Betterment are responsible for teasing apart complex financial concepts and then presenting them in a coherent manner, enabling our customers to make informed financial decisions. In the near term, look for smaller pieces of the analytical workflow which would benefit especially from the efficiencies of reproducible, programmatic analysis and reporting. We made a good effort to understand it. The trick here is that JavaScript is a simple call to jQuerys htmlmethod, and we use Rails built-in partial view rendering to respond with all the HTMLwe need. 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. I thought my 5 year was going to finally show something but it did not. We still want to maximize our objective function V. However, with the introduction of the drift terms, we want every dollar allocated toward a single fund to incur a penalty if it moves the target balance for that funds asset class below or above its target amount. So what does the fake look like? We wrote tests around the methods in question. Examples of projections and recommendations at Betterment. Its part of the CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous delivery) process. There was no hint of arrogance or a lack of candor from anyone. Tooling To simplify development, we use a lot of tooling and infrastructure developed both in-house and by the Julia community. provided they know or can guess its ID - not great! I went above and beyond for years doing extra work, organizations etc and nothing has been reflected in pay. Sometimes there are a few layers of indirection between a service and a Betterment customer, and it takes a bit of creativity to understand what aspects of the service directly affects them. Attaching to our example function with Ruby-FFI is straightforward: From here, we could begin using our function, but it wouldnt be entirely pleasant to work withconverting an input array to a pointer and processing the result would require some tedious boilerplate. One of our primary aims in building this platform was to increase developer velocity, so we needed to eliminate any friction from commit to deploy. Reviewing your professional documents before the interview ensures you're well prepared for questions about skills, previous jobs or educational . Its only been about three decades since companies started using any kind of computer-assisted data analysis. Keeping Our Code Base Simple, Optimally Betterment engineers turned regulatory compliance rules into an optimization problem to keep the code base simple. And here weare! My interactions with technology prior to learning about programming had always been as a consumer. In short its a sloppy feature spec. Failed after the onsite interview because apparently my tech skills weren't "up to par." Every time I went with him on Take Your Child to Work Day, it became more and more clear that I wanted to be an engineer, too. Striving for Simplicity At Betterment, we aim to build products that help our customers reach their financial goals. As such, information on this page may not be up to date. The one additional advantage of integration_test is that it uses the same API as screen tests do, so writing tests with it feels more familiar for developers experienced with writing screen tests. If you havent, theres no better time to start than now. Code Review Our last line of defense is code review. Until now, we executed transactions based on fixed weights or a precise allocation of assets to every level of risk. In the first post of this series we mention one of our principles,Standardize the Pipeline. We then turned to the challenge of rebranding our entire user experience. Helping people do whats best with their money requires providing them with responsible security measures to protect their private financial data. We write our tests, called specs (short for specification) with RSpec and Capybara. R and Python both have great tools to produce finished reports as static HTML or PDF documents, or even interactive reporting and visualization products. Innovative problem solving. The hiring process at Betterment takes an average of 28 days when considering 99 user submitted interviews across all job titles. And we think we made it a little easier for them (and us) to do just that. This, in theory, means that all jobs can be written in more or less the same way, regardless of the job-execution backend. 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. The process took 2 weeks. Senior Executive - Software Engineer. In our view, or the page where we write our HTML, we would write the following to render what you see above: Heres a breakdown of how that one line, translates into what you see on the page. This is a rails specific interview, where you get a rails app and you go through it fixing and creating features. A software engineer needs to be multilingual. How to remove legacy code During our portfolio optimization, we had to come up with a framework for dealing with pieces of old code. As such, our technical interviews switched from whiteboards to computers. Our final allocations are therefore [38271, 43210, 24691, 17284]. By only using the server as a JSON API, the frontend needed to know exactly what to do with that JSON. Did we notice a number of false positives? When I sat down with them to solicit feedback on our entire hiring process, they pointed to the whiteboard problem-solving dynamics (one to two engineers sitting, observing, and judging the candidate standing at a whiteboard) as unnatural and awkward. Dont Do By keeping test dependencies tightly scoped to where theyre used, we avoid the possibility that a test will be added or changed in such a way that impacts the tests previously consuming the dependency. Does not reflect any actual portfolio and is not a guarantee of performance. 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. The special sauce is that it works for more than just your tests. Be the first to find this interview helpful. Those interviewers dont fill out a scorecard, and our hiring managers are forbidden from discussing candidates with them. First, how would we want to make a test harness for this app? With the interviews in hand, the team sat down to pen a manifest and define pillars by which we would measure our progress. From an engineering perspective, this means we needed to enhance the code in our existing trading platform to accommodate dynamic asset allocation, with an eye towards future enhancements in our pipeline. 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. Simply put, weve asserted that the sum of the balances of every fund in Joes taxable account must remain at $11,000. For reference, consider the diagram. On the other hand, some methods are just a means for us to mark content as already safe. 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). This put a band-aid on the problem for a short while. She and I both live in NYC now, and we see each other regularly at speaking engagements and chat over email about networking and inclusion. How did you overcome that feeling? We not only had unit tests such as the one above to test simple scenarios where a human could calculate the outcome, but we also ran the optimizer in a simulated production-like environment, through hundreds of thousands of scenarios that closely resembled real ones. This way, if we cant achieve perfect allocation, we have a buffer that we can fillalbeit at a penalty. Rails makes escaping contenteasier Rails escapes content by default in some scenarios, including whentag helpersare used. When we make improvements to one project types base configuration, we can flip a switch and turn it on foreveryone in the org at once. We now rely on Rubocops Rails/OutputSafety cop (instead of our custom cop) to help ensure that our team is making good decisions about escaping HTML content. We knew both of those would need to change. One area we need to be conscious of is how we render HTML. How is pay, wlb & work culture. Well go into contributing to our platform in more detail below. Alongside this manual testing pain, the automated testing in the existing iOS and android codebases was inconsistent. 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. This makes the tests run faster, and removes the need for having any special tables that dont get cleaned out. Phone screen, technical assessment, "in-person" over zoom as a final interview. Most of the first call went over background/experience technical interviewers pretty much only cared about the technical question asked. Betterment was super supportive and accommodating. This would fundamentally undermine our at-least-once execution guarantees! Betterment is a great company to work for culture wise (as I mentioned) but unfortunately the total comp is not very competitive. Testing requires striking a fine balance - we dont want to under-test either. Tell me about yourself. Further, because all three schemas live in the same MySQL server, client_analytics becomes a central hub from which our colleagues can join tables that have not yet been modeled in the warehouse with key dimensions that have been. How likely is it that youll spot a copy-paste error at row 403,658? Engineering at Betterment: Do You Have to Be a Financial Expert? If, for example, our user research says we should aim for 99.5% uptime, thats 3h 21m 36s of downtime available per 28 days. The variables were solving for are put into a single list. 10 - 15 min recruiter Q & A - answers any questions about next steps This database is a complete, real-time, read-only replica of our production database. When a test case cares about the specifics of a response, it can override that default. I applied online. This means any unhandled exception occurring in your Julia code will result in a segmentation fault. Our principles are a living document in an actual git repository that well continue to add to and revise as we learn and grow. We achieved the same UX wins as a single page app with a fraction of the code. When theres no more work to be had, the worker shuts itself down. Heres an example configuration section for a single job, the linter job for our Coach repository: https://gist.github.com/agirlnamedsophia/4b4a11acbe5a78022ecba62cb99aa85a And heres an example of the Ruby code that helps generate that result: https://gist.github.com/agirlnamedsophia/a96f3a79239988298207b7ec72e2ed04 For each job that is defined in the.circleci/config.ymlfile, according to the project types list of acceptance criteria, we include additional steps to handle notifications and test reporting. Request specs are not mandatory if the controller code paths are exercised in a system spec and they are not doing something different from the average controller in your app. For a basic example, you generally wont need to save a record to the database to test a validation. Soon we were solving for our acceptance criteria requirements left and rightthat Java app needs the PMD linter! Engineering at Betterment: Do You Have to Be a Financial Expert? Less JavaScript. But I soon realized it was just the opposite: Knowing less about finance motivated me to learnquickly. Recently, however, weve invested significant resources in modernizing this research pipeline by converting our codebase from R to Julia and were now able to ship updates to our quantitative models quicker, and with less risk of errors being introduced in translation. Since these contexts change, we found ourselves either altering the partials or copying and pasting their code into new views where additional context-specific code could be added. Thus, its important for engineers to do two things well: (a) be able to remove existing legacy code and (b) not to write code that is likely to become legacy code in the future. Develop a process where your code organizes and saves these variants rather than discarding the ones that didnt work. In order to build this, we needed to do two overhauls: 1) Build a new CI pipeline and 2) Build a new CD pipeline. We repeated multiple styles and page elements throughout the app to make the experience consistent, but we didnt have a great way to reuse the common elements. This is the slightly nicer part of SLOs versus simple monitors - we arent going to be pinged for every latency failure or error rate spike. Or ask the execs at JPMorgan who lost $6 billion in the London Whale trading debacle, also due in part of poor data practices in Excel. For example, they think theyre frauds, or unqualified for their jobs, regardless of their achievements. To process registration events, we maintain a registry server on an EC2 instance provisioned throughTerraform, so updates to the configuration are as easy as running a single `terraform apply` command. Below is a test written in Groovy, which sets up fixture data that mimics the exact situation in our Meet Joe example. An Example As a simple example, lets say we want to edit a users home address. I applied online. Questions Interviews are now more prescriptive regarding non-technical questions. Rule #2: Controllers should pass ActiveRecord models, rather than ids, into the model layer. Work with nonprofits: Groups like NCWIT, the YWCA, the Anita Borg Institute, the Scientista Foundation, and several others are so great for community outreach and company morale. As good companies tend to do, it began growingnot just in terms of users, but in terms of capabilities. The switch to Julia has allowed us not only to optimize and speed up our code by multiple orders of magnitude, but also has given us the environment and ecosystem to explore ideas that would simply not be possible in our previous implementations.

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